Carmen Daugherty
Executive Director
Executive Director
Carmen Daugherty is the Executive Director of Advancement Project, bringing more than two decades of experience advancing community-rooted approaches to justice and social change.
Since joining Advancement Project in 2022 as Deputy Executive Director, she has helped shape a bold, cross-organizational strategy that connects the fight for educational justice, racial justice, and a multiracial democracy. Her work is grounded in a belief that lasting change comes from dismantling systems of punishment and exclusion while building community power, collective care, safety, and self-determination.
Before Advancement Project, Carmen served as Policy Director at Youth First Initiative, where she partnered with organizers and advocates nationwide to close youth prisons and redirect resources into communities. She previously spent nearly a decade at the Campaign for Youth Justice, fighting to end the prosecution and incarceration of young people in the adult criminal legal system.
She began her legal career as a special education attorney and later Deputy Director of a grassroots advocacy organization, grounding her work in the lived experiences of young people and families navigating criminalization and systemic neglect.
Carmen has contributed to the American Bar Association’s Civil Rights and Social Justice section and served on a D.C.-based youth justice advisory group. She is a graduate of Vassar College and Tulane University School of Law.
Raised in Louisville, Kentucky, she now lives in Maryland with her family, with enduring roots in New Orleans.