Anita Vukovic

Anita Vukovic is the Senior Messaging & Engagement Strategist at the California Immigrant Policy Center (CIPC). In this role, she supports CIPC and external partners with harnessing evidence-based messaging strategies derived from attitudinal research to rethink how storytellers and advocates can build power, understanding, and support for immigrant justice in new ways. The daughter of Yugoslav immigrants, Anita comes to CIPC with a broad interdisciplinary background in communications, policy analysis, and social science research. She has accumulated 10 years of experience working in migration and refugee issues both domestically and internationally, including three years as an immigration paralegal in Los Angeles. As a trained social scientist, she also led and assisted projects investigating immigrant integration, governance, and criminalization in New York, Los Angeles, Morocco, and Southern Africa, and has consulted in various policy areas with the International Migrant Bill of Rights Initiative, Overseas Development Institute, and Center for Global Development. Most recently, Anita spent two years at the Downtown Women’s Center in Skid Row overseeing messaging and advocacy efforts, and working alongside community advocates to develop advocacy training programs for unhoused women. She is forever grateful to them for the many lessons learned on how to engage in storytelling and representation that is radically inclusive, authentically self-directed, and always trauma-informed. Anita holds an M.A. in Anthropology from UCLA. She is passionate about the potential of community-based research and storytelling to connect individuals to their own sense of belonging and agency in our increasingly atomized world. In her free time, she likes to camp, cook, craft, garden, and spend hours video-chatting with her family, especially with her sister and her dog Luna.