AAV Welcomes Alexis McGill Johnson to Serve as New Executive Director

Americans for American Values (AAV) is a new project of the Institute for America’s Future. AAV studies and combats racial and other forms of bias in our society. The project’s purpose is to study and test bias, especially unconscious or implicit bias; create and test new methods of exposing bias; and intervene effectively to reduce or neutralize it in the public sphere.

We share this information with the American public through public education efforts about the nature of implicit bias and the ways it can be contained and eliminated.

AAV recently hired Alexis McGill Johnson as its executive director. Alexis McGill Johnson is a political strategist, writer, and organizer.

She was the executive director of Citizen Change, a national, nonpartisan, and nonprofit organization founded by Sean “P. Diddy” Combs to educate, motivate, and empower young eligible voters. Under Combs, she launched the Vote or Die! campaign, creating a new political model for reaching young people and people of color by mixing traditional grassroots mobilization with nontraditional consumer-based marketing methods.

Before joining Citizen Change, she was the political director to Russell Simmons’ Hip-Hop Summit Action Network. She graduated from Princeton in 1993, and received a Masters from Yale University. Throughout her career, she has explored shifting paradigms of identity politics in the post-civil rights era, worked to increase civic engagement among young African Americans, and investigated the implications for demographic and ideological changes of this constituency on national politics.