Lisa Daugaard is the co-executive director at Purpose. Dignity. Action. (PDA), formerly the Public Defender Association, based in Seattle. She joined the Defender Association in 1996 as a public defense staff attorney, later served in multiple management positions, & led TDA’s Racial Disparity Project (RDP), combatting racial discrimination in, and generated by, the criminal legal system at the height of mass incarceration, from 2000-2013. As part of the RDP work, from 2001-2008, Daugaard led a successful selective enforcement litigation challenge to drug arrests of Black people in Seattle. The settlement of that litigation effort resulted in an agreement by Seattle Police Department and the King County Prosecutor’s Office to launch a pilot pre-booking diversion framework for drug offenses, which came into being in 2011 as the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) model. Daugaard was founding co-chair of the Seattle Community Police Commission and served until 2019. In 2019, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for work building consensus around community-based responses to illegal behavior related to unmet behavioral health needs and extreme poverty.
Daugaard obtained her MA from Cornell University and JD from Yale Law School. After law school, she worked in New York City as a fellow at the ACLU National Legal Department, leading a successful challenge to the first US detention camp at Guantanamo (for HIV-positive Haitian asylum seekers). She also served as legal director of the Coalition for the Homeless and organizing project director at the Urban Justice Center.
