The New Jersey Coalition Against Sexual Assault (NJCASA) is pleased to welcome Aaron Potenza to our team.
Aaron will serve as NJCASA’s Program Manager and will work to support survivor-centered, trauma-informed policy and practice throughout New Jersey. He will also conduct assessments, use data to inform strategy, and support the robust portfolio of projects and initiatives designed to support NJCASA’s vision of a safer Garden State.
Aaron is an educator and historian by training and has taught courses on the histories of gender and sexuality at Yale University and Trinity College Hartford. He did his undergraduate work in History and Gender Studies at the University of Rhode Island and his graduate work in American Studies at Yale University.
Aaron has a background in nonprofit management and is passionate about legislative and electoral politics, public policy, and civil rights. He comes to NJCASA from Garden State Equality, where he managed the legislative and policy agenda of the state’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization. He has been privileged to work collaboratively with other NJ advocates to score a number of recent legislative wins, including the expansion of health insurance coverage for transition-related care for transgender New Jerseyans; the mandating of statewide guidelines on transgender students from the NJ Department of Education; the mandating of LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum in NJ public schools; and a modernized birth and death certificate process allowing transgender and non-binary people to access accurate identity documents.
Aaron recently served on Governor Phil Murphy’s transition team as a member of the Education, Access, and Opportunity Committee, and is Chair of New Jersey’s Transgender Equality Task Force, the first statewide interagency transgender task force in the country. Aaron is excited to be joining NJCASA to work for an end to sexual violence through programs that are grounded in an anti-oppression framework that centers survivors. He identifies as a transgender gay man and uses male pronouns.
Aaron can be reached at apotenza@njcasa.org.
