Josiah H. Brown is inaugural executive director of a statewide Connecticut CASA organization, after having served as founding executive director of CASA of Southern Connecticut, part of the national CASA network for children who have experienced abuse or neglect and are in need of court-appointed special advocates. Before, he was the first associate director of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. He worked with New Leaders for a summer during its start-up and was responsible for researching prospective partner cities. Previously, he was chief of staff to the president of the New School (Jonathan Fanton). In earlier roles, Brown was an aide to U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro and to the director of a center at Columbia University. He worked for UConn Upward Bound and ConnPIRG and has volunteered with various urban youth organizations and public schools. He has a B.A. with distinction in history, magna cum laude, from Yale and a master’s in public policy from Harvard, where he co-chaired a Kennedy School student nonprofit management group and was a member of the Social Enterprise Club at Harvard Business School. At the Kennedy School, he and a classmate, Corinne Herlihy, co-authored a report on out-of-school programs and policy for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. A former president of Domestic Violence Services of Greater New Haven, he also chaired the Literacy Coalition of Greater New Haven until brokering its absorption by the United Way. At Yale, since 2008 he has been an associate fellow of Saybrook College, and he also volunteers with the Yale Alumni Nonprofit Alliance (YANA)'s Dwight Hall committee. He is an occasional contributor to the Connecticut Mirror, Good Men Project, New Haven Independent, and Times of India. He and his wife, Sahar Usmani-Brown, live in New Haven with their children.