Dr. Raphe Sonenshein
Executive Director
Dr. Raphe Sonenshein is the Executive Director of the Haynes Foundation. Previously, he served as the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute
for Public Affairs at Cal State LA. He received his B.A. in public policy from Princeton and his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Yale.
Raphe is a nationally recognized expert on racial and ethnic politics, on
California and Los Angeles, and on charter reform. His book Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles (Princeton, 1993) won the American Political Science Association’s 1994 Ralph J. Bunche Award for the best political science book of the year on racial and cultural pluralism. He served as Executive Director of the Los Angeles (Appointed) Charter
Reform Commission that led to the city’s first comprehensive charter reform in 75 years, described in his book The City at Stake: Secession, Reform, and the Battle for Los Angeles (Princeton, 2004).
Raphe has since guided successful charter reform commissions in half a dozen cities. His third book is Los Angeles: Structure of a City Government (2006, League of Women Voters, LA). All three books received significant grant support from the Haynes Foundation. Dr. Sonenshein received a Wang Family Excellence Award as one of the four most outstanding Cal State faculty members. He was a co-recipient of the Haynes Foundation Research Impact Award and received the Harry Scoville Award from
the American Society for Public Administration SoCal Division. Dr. Sonenshein was the fall 2008 Fulbright Tocqueville Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Paris VIII.
In 2022-3, he joined a multi-university collaborative of six scholars supported by philanthropy in the Los Angeles Governance Reform Project,
to make recommendations for better governance at LA City Hall.
