Contributor

Mark Winston Griffith

Mark Winston Griffith is a community economic justice activist, journalist and Senior Fellow in Economic Justice at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy. Mr. Griffith’s articles and public policy analysis on economic justice and community development issues have appeared in dozens of publications including the New York Times, the Nation, the New York Daily News, the Village Voice, the Source, Spin magazine and Essence magazine. Mark is also a columnist with Gotham Gazette, a board member of Free Speech TV based in Denver Colorado, and a board member of City Futures, which includes City Limits magazine and the Center for an Urban Future. As a 2003- 2005 Open Society Institute (OSI) Community Fellow, Mr. Griffith produced two pilot episodes of Talking Democracy, a television talk show that confronted and deconstructed dilemmas in the exercise of American democracy.

From 2005 to 2007, Mr. Griffith served as the co-director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, a policy and community resource organization that promotes economic justice in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Prior to that Mr. Griffith served for twelve years as the founding Executive Director of the Central Brooklyn Partner¬ship, a neighborhood-based organization that builds the capacity of local people to exert political and economic power. While directing the Partnership he also served as the founding Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Central Brooklyn Federal Credit Union, which at the time was the country’s largest Black-owned, community-based financial cooperative.

Mr. Griffith is a gradu¬ate of Brown Universi¬ty (B.A. 1985) and received a Master's degree in contemporary literature from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria in 1988. Mr. Griffith was a 1993-1994 Revson Fellow for the Future of New York at Columbia Universi¬ty and a 2001-2002 winner of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Next Generation Leadership fellowship.

The Los Angeles Times’ Ron Brownstein called Mark a “fresh voice” on economic security policy. He was named one of "Forty under Forty" by Crain's New York Business and Black Enterprise magazines, recognized by Fortune Magazine as one of the country's rising young Black entrepre¬neurs, received the Union Square Award from the Fund for the City of New York, and was the recipient of the New York Magazine award for "energy, vision and independent thinking",

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