Benjamin Torres
President & CEO, Community Development Technologies Center (CD Tech)
Benjamin Torres is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Community Development Technologies Center (CDTech), a 501 (C)(3) nonprofit focused on addressing issues of racial equity and economic justice in low-income areas of South Los Angeles. CDTech empowers marginalized residents to lead the process of their community’s stabilization efforts. Through education, training and community organizing strategies CDTech supports people to both fight for systems change and resource development opportunities while preparing these same communities to take advantage of the change they instigate. Benjamin’s entire career has been focused on placing the tools of democracy directly in the hands of society’s most marginalized residents through education, training, engagement, multi-racial, multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic community building.
For the last 28 years his voice and leadership have supported the South LA region’s Black/Brown neighborhoods to increase their social capital and economic opportunity through inclusive democratic and power building action and the strategic utilization of highly effective public, private, nonprofit and resident partnerships. Benjamin has been with CDTech since 2002. Prior to his appointment by the board in 2010 as CDTech’s President and CEO, Benjamin served as the Vice President of the Working Democracy Division and Director of CDTech’s Community Planning program at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College (LATTC); the MultiCultural Collaborative’s Community School Initiative in Watts.
Born to immigrant Mexican parents and raised in Echo Park, Benjamin Torres embodies the executive leadership encompassing the vision and capacity required to address the challenges and opportunities in South Central LA with a unique message about equity, social justice and economic empowerment, and the value of nonprofits in engaging African Americans, U.S.-born Latinos, immigrants and other marginalized communities. His groundbreaking work in building, supporting and sustaining effective coalitions has resulted in: (1) award of several community benefits agreements re-invested in housing, health services, workforce and small business development, (2) the establishment of large collective impact coalitions like the CD-9 Coalition with over 35 multi-sector stakeholders working in partnership to develop a culture of collaboration in the 9th Council District and the SLATE-Z Promise Zone initiative in South Los Angeles, (3) the expansion of the Community Planning and Economic Development program at Los Angeles Trade Technical College as an institutionalized training model that enables emerging/established grassroots leaders to gain the skills needed to change systemic conditions at the local, state and national levels, and (4) the creation of nonprofit workforce development pipeline aimed at strengthening the community safety net, paid career internships that can lead to living wage salaries and moving the sector toward advocacy. He has developed programs in the area of community capacity building and leadership development and served as technical assistant and trainer to their community outreach efforts with an emphasis on building grass-root African American and Latino leadership cadres.
He is committed to building leadership capacity in South Central Los Angeles as well as national organizations committed to progressive movement building and serves on the Board of Directors of key organizations; Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education (SCOPE), Community Learning Partnership (CLP) a national, organizing network, Latino Media Collective and the For Chicana/o Studies Foundation. He served as the President of the Community Investment for Families
Commission for the City of Los Angeles and was recently appointed by Mayor Karen Bass to Workforce Development Board. He also serves on the Los Angeles County Public Health Equity Task Force Commission. Benjamin lives in Echo Park, where he proudly grew up and lives with his long-time partner Dr. Juana Mora and his daughters Aurelia and Camila Valentina.