Social justice policy & advocacy
Brooklyn, NY
Mustafa Ali-Smith (he/him) is a writer, social justice advocate, and organizer working at the intersection of community building, accountability, and transformative justice.
He is currently a Senior Program Associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, focused on community-centered public safety. In a prior role at Vera, he worked on the Reshaping Prosecution initiative, reducing incarceration and racial disparities by supporting community-based diversion programs and alternatives to incarceration. His other prior roles include a mayoral appointment in Knoxville's Office of Community Safety, where he helped build a violence-interruption strategy; policy work at Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia; and consulting with AHCCCS on Medicaid reentry reforms.
Alongside his policy work, Mustafa is the co-founder of Cue the Record and the founder of the Cue the Record Foundation, an organization that uses music and analog sound as a vehicle for community building, cultural education, and collective memory. Through intentional vinyl listening sessions and community programming across New York City, Cue the Record creates spaces where people slow down, listen deeply, and connect across lines of age, race, and background.
His writing on justice, race, culture, and history has appeared in The Appeal, Truthout, Black Youth Project and his Substack, Redesign America.
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