Queen Adesuyi (she/they) is the National Advocacy Lead for the Fair Budget Coalition. As National Advocacy Lead, Queen spearheads FBC’s effort to expand national solidarity with DC’s fight to defend its autonomy and achieve statehood. She coordinates FBC’s work to leverage people power across the country in service of DC’s self-governance. 

Queen is a DC-based policy strategist, advocate, and cross-movement organizer with a decade of experience successfully leading and advancing local, state, and federal campaigns and policy reform efforts across criminal legal reform, drug policy, harm reduction, police accountability, and racial justice.

Queen was most recently a Policy Strategist for State and Local Government Affairs at Color Of Change (COC). At COC, Queen led campaigns on police and prosecutorial accountability, along with reproductive justice, in various states and localities throughout the U.S., including Chicago, Alameda County, and Georgia. Before COC, Queen spent more than seven years at the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) where they last served as a Senior Manager of National Policy.

At DPA, they led various legislative campaigns, including co-founding and leading the first federal coalition dedicated to marijuana justice. Queen successfully introduced and passed the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act twice in the U.S. House of Representatives. Queen successfully led a coalition effort to decriminalize personal possession and community-based organization distribution of harm reduction supplies criminalized as drug paraphernalia locally in DC. 

Queen is a proud Board Co-Chair for Mirror Memoirs, a national storytelling and organizing collective of queer and trans survivors of color working to end child sexual violence without the use of the carceral system. Queen holds a B.A. in American Studies with a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies from Georgetown University. She is a proud resident of the great Ward 8 and has two adorable pups named Bella and Kashmir.