Carmen Rojas

Background

Rojas grew up in East San Jose, California, the daughter of immigrant parents from Nicaragua and Venezuela. She earned a bachelor’s degree in politics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a doctorate in city and regional planning from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was also a Fulbright Scholar. ^{5 6}

Before completing her doctorate, Rojas was a grants officer at the Mitchell Kapor Foundation (now the Kapor Center), where she oversaw civic engagement and green space access grant portfolios from 2008 to 2011. She also taught in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley and earlier coordinated the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency’s Taskforce on African American Out-Migration. ^{1 7}

Rojas subsequently worked as acting director of collective impact at Living Cities, a collaboration of 22 major foundations and financial institutions that funds left-of-center economic development initiatives. ⁷

In 2014, Rojas co-founded the Workers Lab alongside David Rolf, then-president of SEIU 775 and international vice president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The Workers Lab is a labor-aligned incubator that has funded and mentored organizations pursuing worker organizing and low-wage worker advocacy. Rojas worked as CEO of the Workers Lab until departing to lead the Marguerite Casey Foundation in 2020. ^{8 9}

Marguerite Casey Foundation

Rojas assumed leadership of the Marguerite Casey Foundation in mid-2020. Under her leadership, the foundation launched the Freedom Scholar awards, which provide $250,000 grants to academics working in what the foundation describes as “abolitionist, Black, feminist, queer, radical, and anti-colonialist” fields. ^{5 10}

In 2025, Rojas and foundation board chair Ian Fuller announced that Marguerite Casey would commit $130 million in grants that year, more than five times its typical annual grantmaking of approximately $25 million, describing the increase as a response to what they characterized as the Trump administration’s “political attack on the nonprofit sector, unlike any we’ve seen in U.S. history.” ¹¹

Rojas also works as president and CEO of the Marguerite Casey Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) lobbying arm of the foundation that was formed in 2021. ¹²

Political Statements and Activities

Rojas has repeatedly made public statements supporting the abolition of police and prisons. In August 2020, Rojas posted on social media: “There is no reforming this. ABOLISH THE POLICE.” In April 2021, she posted “Defund the police.” In May 2021, she wrote that “prison abolition is the necessary precondition for any just society.” ⁴

In a February 2022 event hosted by the foundation titled “Becoming Abolitionists: A History of Failed Police Reforms & Vision for True Public Safety,” which Rojas moderated, she characterized foundations aligned with the political right as “fully funding ethno-nationalism, fully funding patriarchy and White supremacy, like, whole hog, every day funding it.” ⁴

In remarks reported by Inside Philanthropy, Rojas described public funding for police as “public dollars for public bad, like the use of public dollars to oppress people, to isolate people, to kill people.” ¹³

In a Bridgespan podcast interview, Rojas characterized philanthropic institutions broadly as “a product of the worst parts of racialized capitalism.” ⁵

Rojas donated $7,600, the maximum contribution, to Stacey Abrams’s 2022 Georgia gubernatorial campaign. ⁴

Compensation

Rojas received $752,641 in base compensation and an additional $64,137 in other compensation, for a total of $816,778 in the Marguerite Casey Foundation’s fiscal year 2023. ¹⁴