Dan has dedicated his career to addressing poverty and inequality through commonsense and innovative solutions across the areas of housing and homelessness, community violence intervention and public safety, reentry, youth justice, education, community economic development, and human services.

Dan began his career as a middle and high school social studies teacher in East New York, Brooklyn through the New York City Teaching Fellows. He was devoted to developing curriculum and activities designed to engage and empower youth in preparation for participatory democracy. 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 Framer of the Constitution.

Following law school, Dan was awarded a Skadden Fellowship, bringing him back to East New York at Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation A (now Build Up Justice NYC) in the Community and Economic Development (CED) Unit, a unique model of providing in-house counsel services to community-based organizations. 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 expanding the ability to amend 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 of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), where he led multiple initiatives at the intersection of crime, public safety, reentry, and 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.

From 2017 to 2020, he worked in the Commissioner’s Office of the Department of Social Services (DSS), the umbrella agency for the Department of Homeless Services and the Human Resources Administration. 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 across the Department. 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 decision-making by City agencies. 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 and often politically sensitive 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.

From 2021 to 2025, Dan served on the executive leadership team of the New Jersey Office of Attorney General (OAG), first as Senior Advisor, then as Senior Counsel to the Attorney General and Assistant Attorney General in 2023. At OAG, Dan led numerous initiatives with critical significance to the Attorney General’s public safety innovation strategy, including: drafting the directives that created three new pioneering entities under the AG—the Division of Violence Intervention and Victim Assistance (VIVA), the Office Alternative and Community Responses, and the Office of Policing Strategy and Innovation. These divisions and offices are the backbone of the AG’s public safety innovations. As the architect of VIVA and the OAG representative overseeing the three new community violence intervention (CVI) programs, Dan helped build the infrastructure for over $120 million in CVI grant programming, making it a national model. He also served as co-chair of the AG Platkin's Multidisciplinary Public Safety Innovation Working Group, which culminated in the AG’s release of the groundbreaking “New Jersey Law Enforcement and Community Violence Intervention Playbook,” which transforms how law enforcement and CVI organizations interact in the field for the purpose of achieving greater reductions in violence. He was also co-chair of the AG’s Youth Justice Working Group: From Secure Care to Restorative Care in the development of a transformative vision for new uses for two juvenile justice system facilities set to close due to the success of the Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative, and served as Chair of the Executive Board of New Jersey’s Youth Justice Commission (formerly the Juvenile Justice Commission) helping to shepherd the extensive overhaul of youth justice regulations to completion.

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

In addition to his law degree, Dan holds Masters in Education from Brooklyn College, and a degree in Anthropology from Princeton University. He lives in New Jersey with his family.