"When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."
Audre Lorde
Meet Ashanti
Apart from her most important role as a mother, Ashanti Jones is also a social worker, speaker, coach and trainer with a specialty in policy reform, restorative and transformative justice, and equity practices.
Ashanti Jones received her PhD from Walden University in 2024 and her MSW from Columbia University in 2018.
She has tirelessly worked to pursue systems-level change by engaging impacted people in advocacy. Grounded by a deep belief in empowerment as the road to social change, Ashanti used her role with the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice to build coalition groups throughout the state of New Jersey, whose advocacy encouraged the Department of Education to build racially accountable reporting systems and allocated $8.4 million to restorative and transformative justice programming for justice-involved youth.
Since the beginning of her career, Ashanti has organized campaigns, given testimony, organized rallies, written various op-eds and reports, and developed toolkits to support the advocacy of the communities she works with.
In 2019, Ashanti won Harvard University’s Saul Zaentz Innovation Challenge by developing programs that would increase parental engagement in educational outcomes. She also serves on various steering committees and statewide advisory boards to represent the interests of youth at risk for adverse childhood experiences including housing insecurity.
In line with Horace Mann’s premise of education being the great equalizer, Ashanti used her role at School House Connection as Sr. Policy and Advocacy manager to ensure an unimpeded path to security exists through education for youth experiencing homelessness through policy writing and advocacy on state and federal levels. She is the author of the Education chapter of the American Bar Associations 2nd Edition of Model State Statutes for Youth and Young Adult Homelessness.
Ashanti is also a professor of Community and Social Justice studies at William Paterson University and a JD candidate at Rutgers University. She is also a member of the Network for Social Work Managers.
