Anthony K. “Van” Jones is an American environmental advocate, civil rights activist, and attorney. Jones is a co-founder of three non-profit organizations. In 1996, he founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a California non-governmental organization (NGO) working for alternatives to violence. In 2005, he co-founded Color of Change, an advocacy group for African Americans. In 2007, he founded Green For All, a national NGO dedicated to “building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.” His first book, The Green Collar Economy, was released on October 7, 2008, and reached number 12 on the New York Times Best Seller list.In 2008, Time magazine named Jones one of its “Heroes of the Environment“. Fast Company called him one of the “12 Most Creative Minds of 2008″.

Jones is currently a senior fellow at the Center For American Progress and a senior policy advisor at Green For All. Jones also holds a joint appointment at Princeton University, as a distinguished visiting fellow in both the Center for African American Studies and in the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

In 1992, while still a law student at Yale, Jones participated as a volunteer legal monitor for a protest of the Rodney King verdict in San Francisco. He and many other participants in the protest were arrested. The district attorney later dropped the charges against Jones. The arrested protesters, including Jones, won a small legal settlement. Jones later said that “the incident deepened my disaffection with the system and accelerated my political radicalization.” In October 2005 Jones said he was “a rowdy nationalist” before the King verdict was announced, but that by August of that year (1992) he was a communist. His activism was also spurred on by witnessing racial inequality in New Haven, Connecticut: “I was seeing kids at Yale do drugs and talk about it openly, and have nothing happen to them or, if anything, get sent to rehab…And then I was seeing kids three blocks away, in the housing projects, doing the same drugs, in smaller amounts, go to prison.”

When he graduated from law school, Jones gave up plans to take a job in Washington, D.C., and moved to San Francisco instead. He got involved with Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), where Jones actively began protesting police brutality. STORM was a socialist group whose official Points of Unity “upheld revolutionary democracy, revolutionary feminism, revolutionary internationalism, the central role of the working class, urban Marxism, and Third World Communism,” and which built connections with other organizations to organize protests, especially against wars and police violence.

By 2005, Jones had begun promoting eco-capitalism and environmental justice. In 2005 the Ella Baker Center expanded its vision beyond the immediate concerns of policing, declaring that “If we really wanted to help our communities escape the cycle of incarceration, we had to start focusing on job, wealth and health creation.” In 2005, Jones and the Ella Baker Center produced the “Social Equity Track” for the United Nations‘ World Environment Day celebration, held that year in San Francisco. It was the official beginning of what would eventually become Ella Baker Center’s Green-Collar Jobs Campaign.

In September 2007, Jones attended the Clinton Global Initiative and announced his plans to launch Green For All, a new national NGO dedicated to creating green pathways out of poverty in America. The plan grew out of the work previously done at local level at the Ella Baker Center. Green For All would take the Green-Collar Jobs Campaign mission — creating green pathways out of poverty — national.

Jones has served on the boards of numerous environmental and nonprofit organizations, including 1Sky, the National Apollo Alliance, Social Venture Network, Rainforest Action Network, Bioneers, Julia Butterfly Hill’s “Circle of Life” organization and Free Press. He was also a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress and a Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. He was a keynote speaker at the youth conference Power Shift 2009 and 2011 in Washington, D.C.

During the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election, Jones served as Arianna Huffington’s statewide grassroots director.

On October 7, 2008, HarperOne released Jones’ first book, The Green Collar Economy. The book outlines his “substantive and viable plan for solving the biggest issues facing the country—the failing economy and our devastated environment.” The book has received favorable reviews from Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Laurie David, Paul Hawken, Winona LaDuke and Ben Jealous.

In February 2010, Jones became a senior fellow at the Center For American Progress, where he leads their Green Opportunity Initiative “to develop a clearly articulated agenda for expanding investment, innovation, and opportunity through clean energy and environmental restoration”. At the same time, he received appointments at Princeton University, as a distinguished visiting fellow in both the Center for African American Studies and in the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Jones is also a senior policy advisor at Green For All.

On February 26, 2010, Jones received the NAACP President’s Award at the 41st annual NAACP Image Awards.

On October 2, 2010, Jones spoke at the One Nation Working Together rally in Washington, DC, where he spoke about linking the fight against poverty with the fight against pollution, saying that green jobs would bring “real solutions” instead of “hateful rhetoric”.

On April 15, 2011, Jones spoke at Powershift 2011 in Washington, DC, where he addressed over 10,000 students on issues of climate justice and standing up for underrepresented communities. Powershift 2011 was the largest youth activism and organizing training in our country’s history.

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