Jordan Posamentier | Source | Vice President of Policy and Advocacy at Committee for Children

Jordan Posamentier has made policy and advocacy the heart and soul of his work at Committee for Children, both as our first director of policy and advocacy and now as our vice president of policy and advocacy. Before joining Committee for Children, Jordan was a New York City public school teacher, the legislative counsel to the California Judges Association, the director of legislative analysis at StudentsFirst, and the deputy policy director at the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education. Jordan believes there’s an intense awareness across the country about how important social-emotional learning (SEL) is for our young people, and that policy helps turn that awareness into practice.

In his position as VP of policy and advocacy, Jordan works at all levels—local, state, federal, and international—to advance policy for equitable and effective SEL. He collaborates with many partners along the way, and throughout the pandemic, Jordan and his team have been committed to ushering forward federal relief legislation that prioritizes SEL. “Social-emotional learning is a fundamental aspect of a young person’s life experience and has been historically undertreated in policy,” he says. “I tend to be drawn to policy areas that are complex, impactful, and evolving. SEL fits all those and then some.”

Jordan earned his JD from the University of Houston, his MS in education from Queens College (CUNY), and his BA in human ecology from College of the Atlantic. He believes Committee for Children embodies a rare and virtuous feedback loop where research, policy, and practice all work together to improve one another to the betterment of the children we serve and hope to serve. “In this way, we’re kind of ‘soup to nuts’ when it comes to tackling our challenges,” Jordan says.

Jordan considers his SEL superpower to be perspective-taking, a skill that’s important in the work he does to help others see the value of SEL—and a skill he uses in his own life. “The folks who are in charge of jurisdictions around the country are quite different from one another,” Jordan says. “When advancing policy, it helps to remove ourselves from the Seattle bubble, look at what’s important to our partners, and learn how SEL shows up in their lives.”