Joe Swanson is a proud Texan who is devoted to confronting the history of systemic injustice in his home state. He joined the staff of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas as their first community organizer after graduating from Wake Forest University with a B.A. in History and Minors in Music and Spanish. With the ACLU of Texas, he helped lead successful policy campaigns across a breadth of Texas’ most devastating arenas of human rights violations and social injustices including those related to immigration, policing, mass incarceration, and our state’s school-to-prison pipeline. Believing faith communities like his own to be uniquely positioned to usher in redeeming and imaginative change, Joe then joined Faith in Texas where he trained clergy and lay leaders to put their sacred texts and spiritual practices into action towards racial, economic, and social justice.

He now serves as a Policy Associate with the Lone Star Justice Alliance where he works to expose and confront the drivers of injustice suffered by our kids in Texas’ juvenile justice system. Joe is committed to the belief that the children we are locking up possess the most power and imagination to bring about transformational change to the very system that incarcerated them.

Outside of his work in social justice policy, Joe is an avid outdoorsman, below-average musician, loud sandlot baseball player (go Mudbugs!), and proud father and husband.