About Diallo
Diallo K. Brooks has spent more than 25 years inside the fight for racial and economic justice as an organizer, a spokesperson, and a senior leader in movement spaces, in government, and in philanthropy. Along the way he has run multimillion-dollar grant portfolios and national campaigns, and he has worked with boards and executive teams as they build equity into the way their institutions run.
He founded Civic Vision Strategies in 2025 to bring that experience to nonprofits, grassroots advocacy groups, and foundations. The practice helps organizations bring their strategy and their mission into alignment, because that is what drives deeper impact and keeps the work accountable to the communities it is meant to serve.
"Strategy and mission in alignment — that is what drives deeper impact and keeps the work accountable to the communities it is meant to serve."
Career
From 2021 to 2025 Diallo was at the Schott Foundation for Public Education, first as Senior Vice President of Programs and Advocacy and then as Senior Equity Fellow at the U.S. Department of Education, a Schott placement in the Office of the Secretary. At Schott he directed a $2.6 million to $2.8 million annual grantmaking portfolio and the foundation's national policy strategy for racial equity in public education. He created and ran the Collaborative Racial Equity Working Group, managed Opportunity Action, a 501(c)(4) sister organization to Schott, and oversaw two fiscally sponsored organizations, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and the People's Think Tank. At the Department of Education he collaborated with the White House Policy Council on the department's Equity Action Plan, which the president had mandated.
Before Schott, he spent 11 years at People For the American Way as a senior leader and chief spokesperson on democracy reform, voting rights, and racial justice. He designed the Defend the Black Vote campaign, which reached 2.5 million Black men across 25 states in the 2020 cycle, built coalition relationships with more than 75 national organizations, and made more than 150 media, panel, and workshop appearances. He also led the Reimagining Public Safety project from the initial research through the final report.
Roots
Diallo's early career took shape at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition and its sister organization, the Citizenship Education Fund, both led by the late Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. That is where he deepened his understanding of organizing and civil rights work on a national level, and he carried those lessons into a decade at the Center for Policy Alternatives, where he trained state legislators and developed progressive state policy and strategy, moving ideas into laws. He was born in Washington, DC, did his first community organizing in his hometown, and still lives in the city today.
Author & Board Service
Diallo is the author of the two-volume Bold Quiet Warrior series. Volume I is a leadership book about disciplined, values-driven leadership across movements, philanthropy, and government, and Volume II, Black Men, Leadership and Justice Work, takes that framework into the specific experience of Black men leading in institutions that were not built with them in mind. He serves on the boards of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and Beacon House DC. He is also a founding board member and Secretary of the Maggie L. Walker Foundation in Richmond, Virginia, which carries forward the legacy of his great-great-grandmother. Walker was the first Black woman in the United States to charter and lead a bank, the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, and she built it in 1903 to serve a community that other banks would not. He sees his own work as a continuation of hers, building institutions that answer to the communities they serve.
