Van Jones, Senior Fellow

Van Jones is a Senior Fellow focusing on “green-collar jobs” and how cities are implementing job-creating climate solutions. Over the past five years, Jones has emerged as a national environmental leader and social entrepreneur. At the Center for American Progress, Van will continue his work championing innovative solutions to the problems of domestic social inequality and environmental destruction.

Since 1996, Jones has served as co-founder and now president of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, promoting positive alternatives to violence and incarceration from its headquarters in Oakland, California. The Ella Baker Center’s Books Not Bars campaign has helped reduce California’s overall youth prison population by more than 30 percent, and in 2003, helped block the construction of a costly and controversial “Super-Jail for Youth” near Oakland.

In the aftermath of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, Van also helped to found ColorOfChange.org, the nation's biggest e-advocacy organization tackling Black issues. In recent years, he has served on the boards of the National Apollo Alliance, Social Venture Network, Rainforest Action Network, Bioneers, and Julia Butterfly Hill’s “Circle of Life” organization. A 1993 graduate of Yale Law School, he has been awarded the 1998 Reebok International Human Rights Award, the international Ashoka Fellowship, the Rockefeller Foundation “Next Generation Leadership” Fellowship, and was selected as a World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader.”

Email: vjones /@\ americanprogress.org

Articles by Van Jones