Founder of Social-Justice Charity Seeks Common Ground

Alan Jenkins had what seemed like the ideal platform for someone who has dedicated his career to promoting social justice.

As director of human-rights grant making at the Ford Foundation, in New York, Mr. Jenkins helped set the agenda for one of the world’s largest philanthropies.

It was the type of work he had always coveted — a chance to work full time to help foster equality and offer support to those devastated by tragedy and squalor.

But even as he lived out his dream, Mr. Jenkins felt he was missing an opportunity. Organizations such as the Ford Foundation perform admirable work, he says. But they are often unable to communicate their ideals to the masses. In turn, their message is obscured by those with competing interests.

To truly bring change, those organizations need to find a more effective way to communicate their stories to a broader audience and find innovative ways to frame the national debate on key issues.

“Proposing ideas for how we can do better together is empowering to people,” Mr. Jenkins says. “Those of us who are working on social-justice issues to expand opportunity often forget to explain why it matters. It’s about people’s lives and it’s also about the values of our country.”

In February, Mr. Jenkins, 43, left the Ford Foundation to start a new nonprofit organization that is hoping to shape that debate.

Together with a group of colleagues, he founded the Opportunity Agenda, a communications, research, and advocacy organization that is working to build the national will for expanding opportunity and equality.

As its executive director, he oversees a budget of $2-million, manages 10 employees, and answers to an advisory board of 20 people. He earns $160,000 annually.

In his new role, Mr. Jenkins is tapping into his background in law, communications, and nonprofit management in an attempt to bring social-justice issues into the mainstream. His goal is to make it easier for civil-rights groups of all types to get attention for their messages.

“If you are a farmworker in rural Pennsylvania, or a construction worker in Newark, or work at a Wal-Mart in New York, a big part of our goal is to show the ways we are connected and why we have a common stake in making things better,” he says.

Tessie Guillermo, an Opportunity Agenda board member and chief executive officer of the Community Technology Foundation of California, in San Francisco, says Mr. Jenkins possesses the ideal skills to oversee the Opportunity Agenda’s efforts.

“Alan really does understand the necessity of messaging in a way that is accessible to a large audience and is inclusive to a large diverse audience,” Ms. Guillermo says. “When I say that, I don’t mean that in the way most people think of diverse. Diverse in terms of interest and experience and thought.”

That diversity can be traced back to Mr. Jenkins’s childhood, which he spent in the Long Island, N.Y., town of Great Neck. There, he was educated in one of the nation’s best public-school systems and grew up in a setting that served as the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby.

But while he grew up in a privileged neighborhood, his parents — both of whom were public-school teachers — also instilled in him a strong sense of his history as a black American.

Both were active in the civil-rights movement — his father refused to give up his seat on a segregated bus in the 1940s, while his mother refused to give blood in a Red Cross blood drive because the organization at the time would separate the blood of black donors and white donors.

Today, Mr. Jenkins is charged with bringing a similarly disparate America together — with showing those of differing backgrounds that they share many of the same ideals. The Opportunity Agenda, he says, must be able to deliver its message to people of different races, ages, economic backgrounds, and religions — and to show them how they can find common ground on important issues.

In an interview, Mr. Jenkins talked about his new role:

How is the Opportunity Agenda different from other social- justice organizations?

We didn’t start with the concept that what the world needed was another social-justice organization.

The biggest challenge to really making progress in terms of social justice and human rights was not a lack of dynamic leaders, of which there are many, but it is really a lack of national will.

There is a disconnect between our values and the public support for those values.

For example, I supported a lot of research when I was with the Ford Foundation. Some of it was successful, but quite a bit of it sat on the shelf. It wasn’t in a language people could understand and respond to. Along with my co-founders, we really decided that we could make an independent contribution by working with groups on the ground doing this work to tell a more comprehensive story.

We have a mission of building the national will. Our strategy is oriented toward helping groups that are already working on tough issues to be effective. There are a lot of great groups out there. There is a need for more groups to come together behind a common strategy.

Where are you starting?

A lot of what we’re doing is communicating. Here are what our national values are. Here are the places where we’ve made progress. Here are the places we are falling short. And here are the places where we can do better.

How do you communicate that message especially in light of the changes that are taking place in the news media?

On the one hand, media is more democratic. We are using strategies like blogs and podcasts that weren’t available a few years ago. On the other hand, mass media is more fragmented. It’s much easier to reach a niche audience. It’s much harder to get that broad audience, to get that Walter Cronkite moment.

Part of our goal is to educate journalists on social-justice issues. Not to make them mouthpieces or advocates. There are a lot of journalists out there who want to discuss issues and problems, but because of resources, they are unable to. We want to give them everything they need to tell the whole story.

How close is the country to embracing your agenda?

Right now, there’s a movement toward common ground and we’re hoping to move toward that. There’s a consensus that we should be moving toward equal funding and resources for schoolchildren, for instance. There’s a consensus that everyone who works should get a living wage. We’re moving farther away from that vision in reality. But when I look at values, it looks like we are moving closer toward that vision.

ABOUT ALAN JENKINS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE OPPORTUNITY AGENDA, NEW YORK

Education: Earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology and social relations from Harvard College and a master’s degree in media studies from New School University. Mr. Jenkins holds a law degree from Harvard Law School.

Previous employment: Mr. Jenkins most recently worked as director of human-rights grant making at the Ford Foundation. Previously, he was assistant to the solicitor general at the U.S. Department of Justice. He has also worked as associate counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In addition, he has been an assistant adjunct professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun and for U.S. District Court Judge Robert L. Carter, and coordinator of the Access to Justice Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

What he’s been reading (and watching): Mr. Jenkins has recently been reading the Bible and the Koran as part of an effort to better understand shared values. He received his copy of the Koran from a taxi driver in Washington, D.C., who talked with Mr. Jenkins about its messages of redemption and starting over. He also likes to watch the situation comedy My Name Is Earl. “It’s also about redemption,” he says.