Email: Vince_at_preventioninstitute_dot_org

Vince Leus is a Program Manager with Prevention Institute, based in our Los Angeles office. Vince has been with Prevention Institute since 2020 and focuses on policy advocacy, aligning public investments with health equity and racial justice, and helping local coalitions and community-based organizations build their policy advocacy and powerbuilding skills. Vince manages PI’s California state policy work, working in partnership with health equity and racial justice advocates in coalitions to bring greater support to the community drivers of health. Vince helps cultivate diverse partnerships so that PI can provide a health equity and racial justice lens to policy initiatives addressing housing, parks and the built environment, repair and redress for past racially-motivated harms, embedding equity in government practice, and advancing community-driven safety solutions, among others. Vince also serves on the Proposition 64 Advisory Group, providing guidance on how the California Department of Healthcare Services administers Prop 64 cannabis tax revenue to youth prevention and leadership development programs.

Vince leads Investing in an Equitable Future, a 3-year project where PI has partnered with 3 community-based organizations to support their work building power and advocating for equitable public investments into housing, civic engagement, environmental justice, and the built environment. He also co-authored Investing in Equity, a 2022 brief that provides recommendations for how government staff can embed equity in the design, implementation, and evaluation of public funding programs they administer. 

Vince’s background is in urban planning, park equity, and environmental substance use prevention, having received his Master of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles and his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. At UCLA, Vince’s research focused on addressing park access in Los Angeles’s park-poor and historically-disinvested communities, exploring policy solutions to open the Los Angeles Unified School District’s recreational facilities for public use. Prior to working at PI, Vince was a community organizer and policy advocate with Koreatown Youth and Community Center, organizing residents to learn about and participate in city planning processes in the City of Los Angeles and helping ensure immigrant and BIPOC voices were central to planning, land use, and alcohol permitting decisions. 

In his free time, Vince is a DJ and enjoys fostering queer joy and building community through music.