Ben Parisi

Ben serves as The Action Lab’s Director of Development & Learning. Previously, Ben served as the Associate Vice President of Health Equity at the United Way of NYC, where he helped to establish a COVID-19 response program through a network of over 100 Black churches nationwide. He has also helped to conceptualize, operationalize, and lead grant-making and grantee programs, including NYC Census 2020’s Complete Count Fund and the NYC Racial Justice Commission’s Community Partners’ Program. An Arabic speaker, Ben lived for several years in the Middle East and managed research and program evaluation for a large humanitarian response program in Syria at the height of the conflict there. Ben got his start as an organizer in DC, where he worked with parents and staff to reverse funding cuts to the childcare subsidy program. He studied philosophy at Columbia University and is pursuing graduate studies at CUNY.