Leap Ambassador Profile

Kevin Jones is keenly interested in those efforts that simultaneously provoke and address a public health response, activate nonprofits and employ the tools of liberation and social justice. He has devoted his personal and professional time to working in partnerships that build the capacity of stakeholders to lead, design and implement community-based strategies, and use data to strengthen the potential for the greatest impact.

He is the former Executive Director of the Urban Coalition for HIV/AIDS Prevention Services, a national coalition of health departments and community advocates working together to improve public health and HIV-related outcomes. During his time with UCHAPS, he helped realign the Board of Directors toward their required and expected duties; inspired new mission-focused programming; and vividly painted budgetary opportunities and constraints to facilitate their sustainability goals. These efforts were greatly informed by past professional roles at the Student Advocacy Center of Michigan, Institute for Community Research, Public Health Management Corporation, Metro TeenAIDS and DC Promise Neighborhood Initiative.

Kevin is remarkably proud of having trained nearly 750 African-American, Latinx and LGBT individuals on using data tools to achieve impact and to inspire the best performance in organizations and community change efforts. Prior to Kevin’s engagement, many operated in roles that did not immediately use data to inform their work; did not have an immediate interest in “data” due to historical abuses in the research community; and/or understood impact from their instinct or gut. A career highlight includes spending four weeks in Gaborone, Botswana training professors and graduate students at the University of Botswana Gaborone in qualitative data collection strategies for their HIV-prevention projects.

Kevin’s passions are deeply informed by his upbringing in Saginaw and Detroit, Michigan; and, coming from a lineage of justice fighters who, in the Americas, faced a lot of oppression and discrimination but still sought a better future for their families and neighbors. Kevin gets his zest for life and passions for gardening and historical archiving from his grandmother. In 2007, Kevin founded the Black LGBT Archivists Society of Philadelphia to collect, preserve and exhibit historical items of significance kept by Black LGBT Philadelphians.

Kevin is originally from Detroit, Michigan. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan and received graduate degrees from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the University of Pennsylvania. Kevin currently lives in Hyattsville, MD.