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.

Since then, she has tirelessly worked to pursue 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.

Since the beginning of her career, Ashanti has organized campaigns, given testimony, organized rallies, written various op-eds and reports, and developed toolkits to support the advocacy of the communities she works with.

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