About Anna Levy
Founder and principal, Jafsadi.works
I am a strategist.
I translate intersecting big picture dynamics, power relations, and incentives into decision-making scenarios, simulations, learning agendas, strategic change options, and coordinated alliances.
I teach at NYU and Fordham Universities—crisis politics, environmental justice, and non-profit leadership and consulting.
Nested within a constellation of colleagues, friends, mentors, and partners, Jafsadi.works is a policy, strategy, research & advisory shop I founded 10 years ago.
Always focused engaging and moving complex systems, here's what my work looks like in practice:
(1) Executive strategy advising in developing new areas or during periods of organizational or programmatic transition.
(2) Landscape and systems mapping for strategic planning, programming, research, decision-making, and or external advocacy.
(3) Designing and facilitating participatory planning & strategy implementation processes for organizations, collectives, movements, city and national governments
(4) Developing strategies for bridging academic and practitioner learning & collaboration across institutions or collectives with divergent operational structures or approaches.
(5) Creating structural impact assessment & accountability audit frameworks; power and follow-the-money maps; data monitoring and tracker development methodologies and architecture.
(6) Conducting political economy, policy, regulatory and systems analysis across multiple fields or sectors
(7) Using long form and oral history style interviewing as part of integrated documentation, field or process synthesis; interviewing and research for public history, memory, art and film.
Partners have included: CIVICUS, Center for Civic Design, Community Action Strategies, the City of Newark, MAELA, the Fund for Global Human Rights, Beautiful Rising, Transparency International, the World Health Organization, the UN Refugee Agency, Oral History Summer School, Feed the Truth, NYU’s Governance Lab, the Open Society Foundations, the Government Accountability Project, ActionAid, what is now the Accountability Research Center, Princeton University, and dozens of smaller grassroots organizations.
Also about me | A bit more formal
My experience and ethic are rooted in coalition-building, participatory strategy, design, and bridging the gap between community-driven agendas and institutional processes that amplify or distort them. This work requires constant analysis of the institutionalized legacies of racial, colonial, and spatial power hierarchies—along with the robust everyday networks of communities leading and shaping alternate presents and futures—that everyday systems are made of.
Translated professionally, this has taken a wide range of forms, from amplifying grassroots interests and power in decision-making processes often driven by corporate or political elites to conducting institutional audits and mapping space for dissent and internal advocacy within large international organizations, to creating and evaluating strategies for membership-based transnational or regional collectives to better monitor transnational supply chains or regulatory permissions affecting their communities and lives.
Alongside this work, I have been teaching at Fordham University since 2018 and New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service since 2022 on related topics. While I studied political and economic transitions, community and oral history at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, most of my political formation and analysis comes from the three regions where I have spent the most time living and working — Southwest Asia (mostly Jordan), Central America and North America. I speak decent Spanish, and try my best with a bit of basic Jordanian Arabic and Portuguese.
I am now based in Brooklyn, NY.