- Civil Rights
- Criminal Justice
- Police Accountability
Ben Jealous serves as president of People For the American Way and People For the American Way Foundation.
Jealous has decades of experience as a leader, coalition builder, campaigner for social justice and seasoned nonprofit executive. In 2008, he was chosen as the youngest-ever president and CEO of the NAACP. During his tenure, he doubled the organization’s budget, grew its online activist base by hundreds of thousands and increased its number of donors eightfold, from 16,000 to 132,000. He also positioned the organization at the forefront of critical social justice issues such as the Trayvon Martin case, the fight against voter ID laws and major protests over the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policies. He pushed for the organization to fight more aggressively for marriage equality, led efforts to register 374, 000 voters and mobilize 1.2 million new voters to the polls, and worked to pass key legislative accomplishments during President Obama’s first term, most notably the Affordable Care Act.
In 2013, the Baltimore Sun named Jealous Marylander of the Year for his work on marriage equality, abolishing the death penalty and passing the DREAM Act. Jealous was the 2018 Democratic nominee for governor of Maryland, and most recently served as a partner at Kapor Capital. He is a graduate of Columbia University and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and he has taught at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania.
Ben Jealous's Areas of Expertise
All Posts
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Blog Post | January 15, 2021
Organizing Made the Victories in Georgia Possible
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Blog Post | December 22, 2020
New Year’s Resolutions the Biden Administration Can Make Right Now
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Blog Post | December 16, 2020
The Other Good News from the 2020 Election
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Blog Post | December 9, 2020
Demand that Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans Stop Blocking COVID-19 Relief
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Blog Post | November 30, 2020
Grateful, Even in 2020
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Blog Post | November 18, 2020
Georgia’s Black Voters Can Make History Again
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Blog Post | November 12, 2020
A Huge Victory – and More Work to Do
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Blog Post | October 30, 2020
A Hard Lesson in Democracy
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Blog Post | October 21, 2020
It’s Up to Us to Defend the Black Vote
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Blog Post | October 16, 2020
Politicians Can Stop Police Killings
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