The political organizer looking beyond the billionaires who set the agenda

FORT LEE, N.J. — Veteran political organizer and professional advocate Jay Jordan knows he’s part of a system. 

He can hear its gears grinding in the voices of the ex-convicts who leave messages on his answering machine every morning asking for help getting their records expunged; in the questions of the employees he trains to develop community ties and recruit allies on the ground; in the marching orders of rich donors who set the agenda for the social causes he helps to champion and turn into law.

But with decades of experience and a laundry list of legislative wins to his name, Jordan has now reached a vantage point where he can see the contours of the system he’s working in and begin to think beyond it.

“Look: What drives organizations? What drives movements? It’s money that’s given by some benevolent donor,” Jordan says, huddled over his laptop in his office beside the George Washington Bridge, which arcs over the Hudson River from Manhattan.

“Then, they hire somebody that directs where the money goes, and the board [signs off]. And that’s all fine — but it’s still the top 1 percent dictating the way,” he says.

Jordan’s nonprofit, the Alliance for Safety and Justice, boasts dozens of legislative victories, mainly on criminal justice reform issues, across a range of blue and red states, but his next ambition is for greater autonomy and decision-making power to pursue the sorts of community investments and social agendas that big philanthropy isn’t interested in.

One such investment would be in recreational centers, which Jordan says have fallen by the wayside as a national funding priority. 

“If I want to start a campaign to get governments to start funding community centers again — there are no grants for that. There’s no pot of money for that. The pot of money at the moment is energy, environment, criminal justice, social justice — you’re always looking to where the funding is,” he says. “All these philanthropic entities have funding priorities that are passed down by billionaires that are the investors in these endowments.”

U.S. income inequality has skyrocketed in recent decades, with only the top 0.1 percent realizing wealth increases over the past 40 years, according to research from Stanford University. Philanthropic giving has seen a concomitant increase over the same period, rising to the level of an economic juggernaut.

Data released this week by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy show that while charitable handouts in the U.S. declined slightly in 2022 due to market uncertainties relating to the pandemic, the total for last year came in just shy of $500 billion, or more than 2 percent of U.S gross domestic product.

That’s more money than 188 different countries and global territories see in a year, according to the CIA’s World Factbook.

Rather than unilaterally being given lump sums by philanthropies every few years for specific projects and proposals, Jordan envisions an operating model in which effective advocacy and social organizations could be allowed to reinvest the money by themselves, using the capital they create to support community development funds with their own independent goals. 

Such a model would run counter to how much of philanthropy currently works but would be legally and financially feasible, he says.

While Jordan is acutely aware of the financial structures and targeted agendas that enable his activism and organizing, he is no less committed to the individual causes he advances and the people for whom his work makes a difference.

One such person called Jordan in early June. He’d served 10 years in prison in Ohio for aggravated arson, believed his sentence was unfairly severe and asked for help getting his record expunged. He complained that his life had been permanently marked over what amounted to simply “a burnt bush.”

“God burned a bush, too, and I don’t think he got 10 years for that,” Jordan quipped over the phone in response. “Degree-one felonies are rarely expungeable in Ohio, but let me connect you with some resources on the ground.”

While his ability to connect with people quickly and meaningfully is a big part of his job, as it is for any professional advocate, what’s often most in demand is his knowledge of the criminal records system, and how that information interacts with state and national laws to limit a person’s economic potential and quality of life.

Jordan breaks that system up into four main databases and communications networks: the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, the databases of state-level justice departments and state and local court records.

“Occupational licensing, like being able to drive a certain kind of truck or get certified for a particular kind of work, is really all about what the state DOJs have. Court databases are the big money maker, because that’s what the consumer reporting agencies and the media use,” Jordan says. 

“I’m really trying to get all of this knowledge out of my head, and out to other people so they can use it,” he continues, with a twinge of frustration in his voice.

With so much intricate expertise on the tip of his tongue, much of what Jordan and his deputies are focused on day-to-day is communication — transferring what they know to the people who need to know it, using everything from pithy slogans to large-scale campaigns.

One campaign involved a sold-out hip-hop concert in 2018 held at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles marketed to formerly incarcerated people to drum up support for record expungement legislation.

“Everyone was super nervous. The Greek said we could do it, but they wanted extra insurance and security. We didn’t want to have armed security, so the Greek said they were going to have the sheriffs come just in case something pops off,” Jordan reminisced of the event earlier this month. “It was a crazy idea … but we did the concert.”

Jordan’s big-picture understanding of the world of advocacy and its relationship to law and economics — of the system writ large — is informed by his own criminal conviction, a first-degree robbery for which he spent 90 months in prison.

Helping people to understand the often lifelong consequences not only of criminality itself but of the plea bargain agreements toward which much of the U.S. criminal legal system is overwhelming skewed is the furnace powering so much of Jordan’s personal zeal.

“Do they tell you that you will be facing these things 20 years later? No,” Jordan says. 

“The depth to which you have to go [to be effective] means operating in multiple levels of society at once — all the longitudes and latitudes.”