Part 2 of SPIA in NJ's Fall 2024 series, New Jersey and the American Economy: What’s Needed for the Garden State to Lead a Thriving Country:

As states across the country face unique and intensifying challenges, leaders and experts across sectors are imagining new and bold solutions that seek to address threats in an intersectional fashion. This conversation will highlight some of these new ideas including a guaranteed basic income and child care for all, and discuss how they can be implemented here in New Jersey to boost our economy and help all in our communities lead healthy, thriving lives.

	Natalie Foster is the President and co-founder of the Economic Security Project, a network dedicated to advancing a guaranteed income in America and reining in the unprecedented concentration of corporate power, and a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiative.  Prior to that she was the CEO and co-founder of Rebuild the Dream, a platform for people–driven economic change, with Van Jones. Foster served as digital director for President Obama’s Organizing for America (OFA) and the Democratic National Committee. She built the first digital department at the Sierra Club and served as the deputy organizing director for MoveOn.org. She’s been awarded fellowships at the Institute for the Future, Rockwood Leadership Institute and New America California, and is a board member of the California Budget and Policy Center, the Change.org global foundation and Liberation in a Generation, a project to close the racial wealth gap. She grew up a preacher’s daughter in Kansas, and is currently raising her family in Oakland, CA.
	Ilyana Kuziemko is the Theodore A. Wells ’29 Professor of Economics, co-director of the Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies, and co-director of the Princeton Program in Public Finance at Princeton University. Kuziemko re-joined the Princeton faculty in 2014, after teaching at Columbia Business School from 2012-14, where she was the David W. Zalaznick Associate Professor of Business. From 2009-10, Kuziemko served as assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where she worked primarily on the development and early implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Her research interests are in the areas of public finance, political economy and labor economics, with focuses on U.S. economic inequality and in particular its interaction with political and labor-market institutions. She also is a fellow of the Econometric Society and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Kuziemko received her A.B. in economics from Harvard University, a second B.A. in mathematics from Oxford University (where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar), and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. She lives in Princeton with her husband and two children.
	Brandon McKoy is the President of The Fund for New Jersey, a philanthropic foundation working to improve the quality of public policy decision-making on the most significant issues affecting the people of New Jersey and our region. He is an established leader in public policy analysis and advocacy statewide and nationally. Prior to his current position, he worked as the Vice President for State Partnerships and Co-Leader of the State Fiscal Policy Division at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C. Brandon is well known for his accomplishments from his time at New Jersey Policy Perspective, where he held several roles over the course of seven years, first as a State Policy Fellow through the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ program, next as a Policy Analyst, and then as Director of Government and Public Affairs, before assuming leadership of the organization as NJPP’s President from 2019 through late 2021. Throughout those years, he researched and promoted a variety of issues including the minimum wage, paid sick leave, equitable taxation, public budget processes, the legalization and regulation of cannabis, and much more. Returning to The Fund for New Jersey in 2024 served as a homecoming given that Brandon worked as a Program Associate at the organization and served as its first philanthropy fellow from 2012 to 2014. Brandon completed his bachelor’s degree at The College of New Jersey and earned a master’s degree from the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. He is a lifelong New Jerseyan and now resides in Hunterdon County with his family.
	Nedia Morsy is the Deputy Director at Make the Road New Jersey, a powerful grassroots movement of immigrant and working-class people. Make the Road operates three organizing hubs in Elizabeth, Passaic and Perth Amboy that provide legal support and services, adult education, and youth development programming. Over the past ten years, Make the Road has won 20 campaigns that transform the lives of our members and policy victories that have helped lift more than 1 million immigrant and working class New Jerseyans out of poverty, including the first guaranteed severance, the strongest temp workers bill of rights in the country, financial aid for Dreamers, and occupational licenses for all. Among other priorities, over the next year as a SPIA in NJ Policy Fellow, Morsy plans to study right-of-center organizing strategies, instruct students in power mapping, and coordinate popular education workshops. Morsy graduated from Amherst College and served as a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs in St. Louis.

Co-sponsored by: Department of African American Studies, Princeton Public Lectures, The Program for Research on Inequality, Labyrinth Books, and Princeton Public Library.