Mark Winston Griffith

Mark Winston Griffith is the founding Executive Director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, a new community organizing and civic infrastructure building organization based in Central Brooklyn. Mark recently left the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a progressive think tank, where he served as the Senior Fellow for Economic Justice, then as Executive Director. Mark is a member of the faculty of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and was a candidate for the New York City Council in 2009.

From 2005 to 2007 Mark served as the Co-Director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project (NEDAP), a policy and community resource organization that promotes economic justice in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Throughout the nineties Mark was the Executive Director of the Central Brooklyn Partnership, a neighborhood-based organization that built the capacity of local people to exert economic power, and the founding President of the Central Brooklyn Federal Credit Union, which at the time was the country’s largest Black-owned, community-based financial cooperative.

Mark’s articles and public policy analysis have appeared in dozens of publications including the New York Times, the Nation, the New York Daily News, the Huffington Post, the Village Voice, the Source, Spin, and Mother Jones. Mark is a board of the Center for Working Families, Brooklyn Cooperative Federal Credit Union, Free Speech TV, and the Center for an Urban Future.

Mark is a graduate of Brown University (B.A.) and the University of Ibadan in Nigeria (M.A.), and was a 1993-1994 Revson Fellow at Columbia University. Mark was a 2003- 2005 Open Society Institute (OSI) Community Fellow; a 2001-2002 winner of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Next Generation Leadership fellowship; and a 1999 New York City Union Square winner.

Mark 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, and was the recipient of the New York Magazine award for “energy, vision and independent thinking.” In 2005 the Los Angeles Times’ Ron Brownstein called Mark a “fresh voice” on economic security policy.

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