Van Jones

For 10 years, Van Jones’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, based in Oakland, California, has addressed issues plaguing urban communities, such as Baltimore. The Ella Baker Center is a strategy and action center that promotes alternatives to violence and incarceration and works for justice, opportunity and peace in urban America.

Jones long has served as a passionate advocate for social justice. When he was just 27, the Yale Law School graduate convinced the California State Bar Association to license him to launch the first certified lawyer referral service for police abuse victims in Northern California, earning him the 1998 Reebok International Human Rights Award. Since then, Jones has led efforts to reform California’s juvenile justice system to focus on rehabilitation, to involve youth in promoting peace on Oakland streets and to create more job opportunities for people leaving, or at risk of entering, prison.

Jones, who graduated from Yale Law School in 1993, has received many honors for his work, including an Ashoka Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and recognition as a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum. His organization, the Ella Baker Center, is a grantee of the Open Society Institute. Jones served as the guest editor of Baltimore’s Urbanite magazine in April. He most recently has focused on creating opportunities in the “green economy” – jobs in renewable energy, alternative fuels, and green construction, for instance – to lift people out of poverty.