Carmen Perez

Carmen Perez — who also appears as Carmen Perez-Jordan — is president and chief executive of The Gathering for Justice, and was one of the national co-chairs of the 2017 Women’s March.

The Gathering for Justice

The Gathering for Justice describes itself as having been established in 2005 by Harry Belafonte, after the arrest of a young child in a Florida classroom, and states its mission as working “to transform the criminal legal system and advance civil rights to build a beloved community grounded in justice, equity, and compassion.” Its staff page lists Perez as President & Chief Executive Officer.

The organization’s filings put its scale in context: a 501(c)(3) in New York with revenue between roughly $880,000 and$2.2 million across the tax years 2020 to 2023, spending between $1.4 and$1.6 million a year. Its IRS ruling date is April 2015, a decade after the founding year it gives — a gap consistent with earlier operation under fiscal sponsorship.

The 2017 Women’s March

Perez was one of the national co-chairs of the Women’s March on Washington on 21 January 2017.

The Crowd Counting Consortium — now a Harvard Kennedy School programme — exists because of it: it emerged from Jeremy Pressman’s and Erica Chenoweth’s effort to estimate participation in the march and its sister events, and its data established that 21 January 2017 was the largest single-day demonstration in US history to that point.

Digital Political Impact

• Leads an organization whose work is criminal-legal reform rather than online media, and whose relevance here is as one of the institutional bases from which the 2017 mobilization was organized
• Was a co-chair of the mobilization that researchers established as the largest single-day demonstration in US history to that point, which led to the creation of a standing counting infrastructure (the Crowd Counting Consortium) to measure it

What Is Not Established Here

Removed in the citation audit: her birth year; an Instagram follower count; her upbringing in Oxnard, the death of her sister, her degrees, and her work as a bilingual probation officer; the dates of her move to New York, her national organizer role from 2008 and her becoming executive director in 2010; the 2013 co-founding and composition of Justice League NYC; the 2015 March2Justice and its route and demands; the specific participation range of 3.3 to 4.6 million for the Women’s March; her named contributions to the march (the Unity Principles, the Artist Table, over 500 organizational partners); and the account of the Women’s March organization’s 2018-2019 leadership controversy and the co-chairs’ 2019 departure from its board. That last item concerns living people and allegations, and is not restated without a source that was read.