Jean-Pierre Brutus is a senior counsel in the Economic Justice Program at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice and Convener of the New Jersey Reparations Council. He leads and manages the Institute’s reparations advocacy.

He is FirstRepair’s East & Mid-Atlantic Regional Leader. He is a member of the Strategic Identities Committee of the Why We Can’t Wait Network and of the Policy Subcommittee of New Yorkers for Reparations. He is an affiliate of the University of Michigan’s Slavery and its Aftermath Initiative. He is also the facilitator of FirstRepair’s Reparations Book Club.

He is a co-author of “More than a Check: Building Narrative Power for Black Reparations” in Liberation Stories: Building Narrative Power for 21st – Century Social Movements.

He was a member of Liberations Ventures’ Reparations Narrative Lab and represented the Institute as a community fellow on the Rutgers- Newark Crafting Democratic Futures Project on community dialogues on reparations.

Prior to joining the Institute, Jean-Pierre worked at Legal Services NYC, where he represented Bronx tenants facing eviction as part of New York City’s right to counsel program. Jean-Pierre is a graduate of Georgetown University. He earned his PhD in African American Studies and JD from Northwestern University.