Jesse Fairbanks is a policy analyst on CLASP’s public benefits justice team, where they specialize in federal rental assistance and meaningful community engagement. They also represent the team in coalitions focused on baby bonds, guaranteed income, and reparations.

Prior to joining CLASP, Jesse founded a large-scale mutual aid fund for first-generation students with low incomes evicted because of COVID-19. The fund ultimately raised and distributed more than $375,000 to 350+ students. They were quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and Business Insider for the community organizing effort, as well as consulted by student groups across the United States developing similar mutual aid funds. They previously worked at RESULTS through the Congressional Hunger Center’s Zero Hunger Internship.

Jesse graduated from Wesleyan University with a bachelor of arts in English and political science. Their award-winning thesis combined archival, oral, and political histories; critiques of contemporary benefits programs; and elements of memoir to tell a scathing but singular story of intergenerational poverty in East Tennessee. The collection of nonfiction essays invited people like the stubborn, often-hateful, and always-hungry grandmother who raised them to trace the anti-Black history of public benefits programs that built the white middle class.