Ashanti is a Policy Analyst in the Criminal Justice Reform Program at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice.

Apart from her most important role as a mother, Ashanti Jones is also a social worker, speaker, and policy analyst with a specialty in juvenile justice, restorative and transformative justice, and equity practices.

Ashanti Jones received her MSW from Columbia University in 2018 and her Ph.D. in Social Work from Walden University in 2024.

Since then, she has tirelessly pursued systems-level change by engaging impacted people in advocacy. Grounded by a deep belief in empowerment as the road to social change, Ashanti uses her role with the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice to build coalition groups throughout the state of New Jersey, whose advocacy encouraged monumental reforms, including allocating $8.4 million to restorative and transformative justice programming for justice-involved youth.

From the start of her career, Ashanti has been deeply committed to amplifying community advocacy to reflect the brilliance of the communities she serves through organizing campaigns, providing public testimony, leading rallies, authoring op-eds and reports and developing accessible toolkits.

Ashanti is a professor of Community and Social Justice studies at William Paterson University and a Juris Doctor candidate at Rutgers University. She is also a member of the Network for Social Work Managers.