Colby Lenz

Colby Lenz is a community organizer and a graduate student in American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Colby’s experience includes anti-eviction organizing in New York and anti-poverty organizing with queer and transgender youth deprived of housing in San Francisco. Colby currently organizes for prison abolition, prisoner survival and trans/gender liberation with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. To do this work, Colby has been visiting with people in California’s women’s prisons for the past 13 years. This organizing involves survival support work, building leadership power with people in prison and formerly imprisoned people, and working to develop and demand community-based responses to violence that do not rely on or reinforce the prison industrial complex. Colby is committed to collaborative scholarship focused on refining and strengthening social movement strategy to end policing and prisons.