Jesse Fairbanks is a policy analyst on CLASP’s public benefits justice team, where they work to improve access to public benefits for people with low incomes.  Prior to joining CLASP, Jesse founded a large-scale mutual aid fund for first-generation, low-income (FGLI) students evicted because of COVID-19. The fund ultimately raised and distributed more than $375,000 to 350+ students. They were quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and Business Insider for the community organizing effort, as well as consulted by student groups across the United States developing similar mutual aid funds. Their most recent position was with RESULTS where they wrote on topics ranging from Pandemic EBT (P-EBT) and SNAP Emergency Allotments (EAs) to the Black and Indigenous roots of guaranteed income as a policy proposal. They graduated from Wesleyan University with a BA in English and political science. Their award-winning thesis combined archival, oral, and political histories, critiques of contemporary benefits programs, and elements of memoir to tell a scathing, but singular, story of intergenerational poverty in East Tennessee. The collection of nonfiction essays invited people like the stubborn, often-hateful, and always-hungry grandmother who raised them to trace the anti-Black history of public benefits programs that built an exclusive, disproportionately white middle class.