Crystal Li

Crystal Li

Crystal is a project manager with a practiced eye for operations efficiency. She uses her skills to transform the visions of social change leaders into reality.

Crystal is the Senior Associate and Project Manager for Performance and Results (PAR). PAR uses the Results-Based Accountability (RBA) framework to guide Living Cities project teams in understanding how to collect and analyze data for continuous learning. Operationally, our aim is to support staff members and teams in developing their capacity to make meaningful and measurable contributions as people in their roles on teams and in our system. Previously, Crystal was the Associate for the Public Sector Innovation portfolio where she worked on the City Accelerator for Equitable Procurement and the Civic Tech and Data Collaborative.

Crystal joined Living Cities in 2016 as a Summer Intern. Prior to joining Living Cities, she was the Executive Project Manager at New York Film Academy, and the Department Manager of Asian Intellectual Property at TransPerfect Translations. She received her Master’s from Columbia University in Sustainability Management and her Bachelor’s from Binghamton University in Financial Economics.

Crystal Li

Contributing Articles

Model Minority No More: Towards a Model of Mutual Struggle

Living Cities joins the more than 500 philanthropic leaders who have committed to building multi-racial solidarity and shifting funding to communities of color, including Asian-American Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities, to help dismantle white supremacy and all forms of oppression.  We mourn the deaths of Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, and Daoyou …

Bringing Heart to Data: How to Measure the Unmeasurable

How can we connect team or project activities to larger organizational goals? And how can we be sure our actions are having a measurable effect on ourselves, our partners and the world? In this blog, we share aspects of our performance measurement process so that readers can understand how we answer these questions and connect our day-to-day work to our …

Bringing Our Results Framework to Life: Building a Data Culture

In the first of this two-part series, we introduced the intersection of racial equity and results-focus in our work, and shared how we’ve come to recognize that any strategy for economic justice must address structural racism as a root cause. In this piece, we tell the story of bringing that commitment to life by shifting our organizational culture. By all indications, racial …

The Little-Known History of Chinese Restaurants

For Asian Pacific American Heritage month, I wanted to share a portion of my culture’s history. We need to be able to support each other to lift up our voices and share how our struggles are rooted in white supremacy culture. When my family immigrated to the U.S., almost all of my uncles’ and aunts’ first jobs were in the …

Getting Real About Results

Philanthropy holds more than $1.5 trillion in assets globally, more than the U.S. federal government’s entire budget in 2018. Despite the fact that much of this funding goes toward social change work, gaps in outcomes across areas like health, education, income, and wealth are getting worse, not better. As a collaborative of the largest U.S. foundations and financial institutions dedicated to …

Contributing Resources

Using Art to Center Humanity in Our Theory of Change

Nearly seven years ago, Living Cities began its racial equity journey. However, it wasn’t until recently that we explicitly named race and racial equity in the work that we do . We realized that we couldn’t achieve our North Star – All people in US cities are economically secure and living abundant and dignified lives – if we weren’t focused …

Learning and Insights Tracker

This resource is used by staff at Living Cities to track progress towards our organizational results. Please download and adapt the template for your own work. The first sheet is a place for you to capture your big-picture learning questions, hypotheses about how your work will have an impact, and assumptions about the work you are doing. It also has …

Achieving Results by Centering Race Internally and Externally

Living Cities has committed to a new vision and mission that focus on closing racial gaps. This Theory of Change outlines how it will achieve its new goals. Living Cities’ members recently made a commitment to work together and fund our work for another three years–this time with an explicit focus on racial equity. This is the first time in …

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