Director 2

Executive Director

The Justice for Everybody Movement (J4EM) is a Yale University initiative dedicated to reimagining public safety as a collective, democratic responsibility

with a clear goal of becoming a fully recognized institute. Rooted in interdisciplinary scholarship and sustained through deep partnerships with directly impacted communities, J4EM works at the intersection of research, education, community engagement, and structural reform.
Founded and led by Elizabeth Hinton

the Class of 1954 Professor of History, Black Studies, and Law at Yale, and founding co-director of Harvard's Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center

J4EM advances a vision of justice through a community of scholars, practitioners, students, defenders, and advocates working to move beyond diagnosis and toward repair: widening access to justice, demanding institutional accountability, and building a democracy resilient enough to confront its own failures.
J4EM operates through four interlocking initiatives

Education, Advocacy, Reform, and Partnerships

and maintains a robust team including researchers, community engagement staff, fellows, and embedded project units such as the Challenging Discrimination in the Law Project and the Inside Knowledge journalism program.
J4EM seeks a visionary, entrepreneurial Executive Director to serve as the organization's operational and strategic leader. This is an extraordinary opportunity for a leader with deep institutional fluency, intellectual range, and a genuine commitment to justice reform to shape one of the most ambitious university-based public safety initiatives in the country.
The Executive Director will partner closely with Founding Director Elizabeth Hinton to set organizational vision, manage and grow a talented team, forge institutional collaborations across Yale's schools and departments, and position J4EM as a national convening force for interdisciplinary research and community-centered change. The role demands executive-level judgment, the ability to operate simultaneously across the academy, civic sector, and philanthropic landscape, and a sophisticated understanding of the structural drivers of inequality in the American criminal legal system.
Core Responsibilities
Strategic Leadership & Organizational Vision
Cross-Yale Institutional Collaboration
Harvard Partnership & Peer Institution Engagement
Team Leadership & Organizational Development
Nonprofit Partnerships & Impact City Engagement
Fundraising, Donor Relations & External Relations
Teaching, Curriculum Design & Digital Learning
Global Comparative Research & International Convenings
Financial Management & Budget Oversight
Qualifications & Competencies
Required
Preferred
Leadership Profile
The ideal Executive Director brings together the intellectual seriousness of a scholar, the operational discipline of a senior administrator, and the relational intelligence of a movement builder. This is someone who understands that the work of justice reform happens simultaneously in the seminar room, in the statehouse, in the prison yard, and on the street

and who can move fluidly across all of these worlds without losing the thread that connects them.
This leader is not content to manage what exists. They are excited to build

to imagine a fellows program that becomes a national model, to forge a Yale-wide coalition that makes J4EM a genuine institutional force, to deepen the Harvard partnership into something generative and enduring, and to stand alongside community partners in Connecticut and beyond as a genuine co-conspirator in the project of structural repair.
Above all, this is someone who believes, as J4EM does, that justice is not a destination reserved for the few

but a shared condition that must be actively built, defended, and extended to everybody.