Dan Hafetz, Principal

Dan is a lawyer and policy expert. He is a former teacher and a veteran of New York City government and non-profits.

He has devoted his career to the public interest, working to promote equity, justice and fairness, and to address poverty across the spheres of education, housing, community development, human services, criminal justice, and government.

Dan began his career as a social studies teacher in a public middle school in East New York, Brooklyn through the New York City Teaching Fellows.

He went on to teach high school at the pioneering Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice. At both schools, he devoted himself to using his study to develop curriculum and activities designed to engage and empower youth in preparation for participatory democracy. Dan and his students founded community gardens, using the experience to help his students build the confidence that they can control their own destinies.

While in Law School, Dan was the Symposium and Technology Editor of the Fordham Law Review, overseeing six symposia and editing their publication. Among them was a two-day event followed by a volume on the 25th Amendment and Presidential Succession, where, along with the Editor-in-Chief, he interviewed Senator Birch Bayh, a modern founder of the Constitution. He also created the template for what would become the Law Review’s online publication forum.

Following law school, Dan was awarded a Skadden Fellowship, bringing him back to East New York at Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation A in the Community and Economic Development (CED) Unit, a unique model of community-based legal services for non-profits. Dan helped Brooklyn A turn its attention to green community economic development.

In 2013, he moved onto New York City government, where, over the next seven years, he served in several agencies. As Committee Counsel to the New York City Council’s Health Committee, Dan drafted and helped oversee the enactment of several groundbreaking laws, including a law amending the gender marker on birth certificates, novel regulation of tobacco and cigarettes, and electronic cigarettes, including raising the smoking age to 21, and reform of the Medical Examiner’s Office following a scandal related to the testing of rape kits.

In 2015, he became Senior Advisor to the General Counsel to the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), where he led multiple initiatives at the intersection of crime, public safety, reentry, housing and homelessness, including the reform of NYCHA’s Permanent Exclusion policy and the development of data sharing systems and policies between the NYPD and NYCHA. Most recently, he worked in the Commissioner’s Office of the Department of Social Services, the umbrella agency for the Department of Homeless Services and the Human Resources Administration, with a combined workforce of over 16,000 people and a budget of $12 billion. At DSS, he managed and led interdepartmental projects, including in rental assistance and rehousing programs, civil rights, and had a special focus on IT, where he led and created an inter-departmental IT governance process spanning three agencies on the review and approval of multi-million-dollar design projects, and led a comprehensive MRO analysis and planning framework. He served as the agency point for interagency task forces, including the City’s Automated Decision System Task Force, which worked at the intersection of the use of algorithmic tools and civil rights in City decision-making. Throughout his time in NYC government, Dan was instrumental in leading interdepartmental teams in the design, development and roll-out of innovative solutions to complex problems.

His work then brought him to the New Jersey Reentry Corporation, a non-profit serving over 9,000 justice-involved individuals. As Executive Director of NJ Reentry, Dan set the strategic vision for the organization’s program development, including in the areas of housing, rehabilitative release, employment and training, and program design for substance use disorder treatment and peer recovery services behind the wall.

In 2020, Dan founded Dan Hafetz LLC which has been renamed Policy Ground.

In addition to his law degree, Dan holds Master of Arts from Brooklyn College, and a degree in Anthropology from Princeton University. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two daughters, and dog.

Key Publications

Reentry Housing: A Rehabilitative Release Proposal, published by the New Jersey Reentry Corporation (Spring, 2021).

Reentry Training and Employment Report 2021, published by the New Jersey Reentry Corporation (Spring, 2021).

“We Can Still Make This Election About Climate Change,” self-published in Medium (October 29, 2020)

Advisor to the authors of “Report to the New York City Housing Authority on Applying and Lifting Permanent Exclusions for Criminal Conduct” (2017) published by the Vera Institute of Justice, authored by Margaret diZerega, Gregory “Fritz” Umbach, John Bae (2017)

Jump Starting the Solar Economy Means Bringing Solar to Every Home, One Neighborhood at a Time, Triple Pundit (Nov. 11, 2011)

Interview, A Modern Father of Our Constitution: An Interview with Former Senator Birch Bayh, 79 FORDHAM L. REV. 781 (2010) (co-author).

Community Economic Development Lawyers Assist Nonprofit Organizations in Creating Holistic Green Communities, 44 CLEARINGHOUSE REV. 257 (Sept.-Oct. 2010) (co-authored with Jessica Rose and Nicole Prenoveau).

Editor’s Foreword, Notes from the New World: The Future of the Internet, 78 FORDHAM L. REV. 2751 (2010) (co-author).

Student Note, Ferreting Out Favoritism: Bringing Pretext Claims After Kelo, 77 FORDHAM L. REV. 3095 (2009) (an analysis of Takings and Eminent Domain in the aftermath of the historic Kelo case and arguing for “process scrutiny” in Taking cases to protect the public interest).

Researcher & Co-author, Recreating Public Schools: Guide to Restructuring Large Schools into Smaller Learning Communities, Center for Educational Innovation – Public Education Association (2008).