Senior Policy Analyst
Ali Jawetz is a Senior Policy Analyst on the Systems Change team at CSSP. In her role, she supports two teams that monitor state child welfare systems facing class-action litigation, operating under federal consent decrees. These projects entail working with states to implement best practices on child welfare reform, assessing progress by reviewing data, interviewing stakeholders, and meeting regularly with system leaders, and providing progress reports to the federal court and the public on the status of reform work. She also serves on CSSP’s Equity Inclusion and Justice (EIJ) team, through which she works with staff and organizational partners to apply CSSP’s Antiracist Intersectional Frame. Most of Ali’s work focuses on promoting well-being for adolescents in foster care and the population of youth dually experiencing both child welfare and juvenile justice systems.
Additionally, Ali is co-leading a project about collecting personal identity data (on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, tribal affiliation, etc.) from families involved with child welfare systems in more accurate, inclusive, and affirming ways. Through this work, Ali hopes jurisdictions can develop targeted strategies to reduce disparities and ensure families are served in ways that best meet their individual and cultural needs. She is invested in promoting community-based programming, accessible health care, affordable housing, and other voluntary primary prevention services that can alleviate historical harms to disenfranchised communities. Ali graduated with her Master of Public Policy degree from the Frank Batten School of Leadership & Public Policy at the University of Virginia, where she also received her undergraduate degree in American Studies with a focus on Race and Ethnicity studies and Spanish. While at the University of Virginia, she co-founded a summer program for high school students to study the history of slavery and its legacies in Charlottesville, called the Cornerstone Summer Institute, which is still operational.