Aaron Yore-VanOosterhout designs and carries out community-based research to help nonprofits, schools, and other organizations better serve people. Since joining the Johnson Center in 2017, he has been honored to work with organizations providing housing to people experiencing homelessness, educators and administrators at K–12 schools, and universities providing postsecondary education in prison, among many others.

For reasons both personal and academic, Aaron is particularly passionate about working with incarcerated people, as well as those who have recently arrived in the United States. Both groups of people are among the most exploited and vulnerable in our society. Both are subject to complex systems designed to exclude them from full participation in their communities — to disenfranchise them and prevent them from exercising their political voice, even as their plight is used to gain political advantage.

Aaron has worked toward carceral system reform for more than a decade, including as an independent consultant for the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, where he investigated long-term incarceration in state correctional facilities. He is currently working with colleagues at the Johnson Center and Grand Valley State University to develop a postsecondary prison education program at the university. Aaron also serves as a research consultant for Lighthouse Immigrant Advocates, a nonprofit immigration legal office in Holland, Mich.

Aaron has a doctorate in history from Michigan State University, with a focus on race, mutual-aid societies, and anti-state rebellion in 19th-century Mexico. He also earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and Spanish from the University of Notre Dame.