Trinity Tran

Activist, Artist, Change Agent, Environmentalist, Explorer, Idea generator

Trinity Tran is the co-founder and Executive Director of the California Public Banking Alliance (CPBA) and Public Bank Los Angeles (PBLA), organizing to move public money out of Wall Street banks and build public banking as civic infrastructure so taxpayer dollars are reinvested locally in affordable housing, small businesses, and climate resilience. After the 2016 election, she launched Divest LA and co-founded Public Bank LA, helping set the stage for Measure B (2018), the first U.S. voter referendum on a city-owned public bank. In 2019, she led the statewide coalition that passed the California Public Banking Act, the first law of its kind in the nation, with regulations finalized in 2022. She also helped pass CalAccount, a no-fee public banking option designed to reach more than 7 million unbanked and underbanked Californians and now works with the State Treasurer and community partners on its rollout. From 2020 to 2024, she led Urban Partners Los Angeles, launching an emergency food bank that delivered more than 270,000 grocery boxes during COVID-19. Trinity was named Woman of the Year by the California State Legislature in 2021, and her pandemic response work was recognized in the United States Congressional Hall of Records. In 2026, she is leading a coalition to expand California’s IBank into a state-owned public bank.

I’m passionate about taking our money back. Billions in public dollars are siphoned out of our communities every year, and I’m focused on keeping it local, under public oversight, so it can build what people actually need. I’ve been laser-focused on this for nearly a decade because I believe shifting banking and finance toward a more conscious, people-centered system is fundamentally transformative. I’m also committed to building a world where food banks are obsolete because families have what they need long before crisis hits. I’m car-free and love hikes and grounding in nature. I also love hunting for emerging, obscure future garage/electronic tracks like a music truffle hound.

An idea worth spreading is that public money should function as public power. Every year, billions leave our communities through banking fees and interest payments while cities struggle to fund affordable housing and clean energy and small businesses lack access to low-cost capital. The problem is not scarcity. It is that public dollars move through systems designed to extract, not reinvest. We're building public financial infrastructure to change that through city-owned public banks, universal fee-free accounts like CalAccount, and state-level tools that reduce borrowing costs and support local lenders. This work is about partnership, not replacement, so credit unions, CDFIs, and community banks can lend more and keep capital circulating locally. We led the passage of two first-in-the-nation laws in California. Now we focus on implementation, moving public banks from feasibility to launch and rolling out CalAccount so millions can access free accounts. This is how communities stop bleeding money and start building with it.

My TED story is about how our money system decides who gets invested in and who gets left behind, and what happens when communities decide they’re done playing by those rules. It’s about redirecting public dollars away from extractive systems and building finance that answers to people, not profit.

I’m good at maneuvering a lot of moving parts to solve complex problems and figuring it out when the resources aren’t there.