Matthew Palevsky
Strategy
Matthew has been an activist since elementary school, when he organized a coalition of Los Angeles schools to lobby City Hall for tougher gun control laws. A young technology geek he eventually took his organizing online and for the past six years has been working at the cutting edge of crowdsourced production and online campaigning.
In his college years, Matthew spent most of his time working to overturn draconian drug laws. He co-founded the Council on Crime Prevention, a state-funded research house that advised Rhode Island on treatment-instead-of-incarceration policies, and the Rhode Island Patient Advocacy Coalition, a grassroots organization that led the fight to make Rhode Island the eleventh state to legalize medical marijuana. After graduating he spent two years as a journalist covering the 2008 elections and running the citizen journalism desk at The Huffington Post, where he organized over 22,000 volunteers to execute award-winning coverage of national and international news.
In 2010, Matthew left The Huffington Post to join Students for Sensible Drug Policy, a student-led organization that advocates for harm reduction policies on over 150 campuses across the US and in countries around the world, including the UK, Canada, Nigeria and Australia. After leading the Brown University chapter and serving as the national Board Chair for many years, he had the privilege to serve as SSDP’s Executive Director and presided over the largest Congress in the organization’s history.
Matthew also sits on the board of Threshold Foundation, is a founding board member of Runa LLC and a fellow at the Poynter Institute for Journalism. When not in the city he can usually be found on a surfboard or wandering across the Nevada desert.
