Dr. Lydia Bean

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Dr. Lydia Bean, Advocacy Director, is a social scientist and organizer who has won hard fights for working families on issues like paid sick time, predatory lending, and criminal justice reform. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. In 2014, she founded Faith in Texas, a nonprofit that organizes churches, mosques, and synagogues across lines of race, ethnicity, and religion. Lydia is an expert on grassroots organizing, strategy for policy campaigns, and the role of religion in public life. As a Fellow at New America, she has written about achieving policy change in conditions of political polarization and contested federalism.

Lydia’s research and commentary have been featured in the Washington Post, Democracy, Washington Monthly, Inside Philanthropy, Sojourners, Social Science Quarterly, Sociology of Religion, and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. She is the author of The Politics of Evangelical Identity, published by Princeton University Press.

Lydia is a member of the “sandwich generation,” and she lives in a multi-generational household with her husband, son, parents, and grandparents. When she’s not chasing her toddler, she enjoys lifting weights, singing, baking bread, and smoking a Central Texas-style brisket.