Xavier de Souza Briggs

Xavier ‘Xav’ de Souza Briggs is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Trained as an engineer and behavioral scientist, he is an award-winning educator and researcher as well as an experienced leader in government and philanthropy. 

Known for his wide range of interests and track record of building and reshaping fields, Briggs is an expert on economic opportunity and inclusive growth, racial equity and pluralism, urban and regional development, and inclusive democratic governance in the U.S. and abroad. He has testified before Congress on several of these topics. 

His work at Brookings has focused on inclusive markets, good jobs, equitable climate action, and tangible ways to advance equity and inclusion in how government works. He has helped catalyze public conversation about generative AI and the future of work and workers; how big federal bets on “new industrial policy” can generate real and lasting economic benefits for the workers and communities that need it most; how clean energy and other investments can be more equitable, scalable, and adaptive; the power of equity impact analysis (aka “equity scoring” of proposed policies and plans) to help government serve everyone more effectively and strengthen public trust; and the urgency of engaging communities and investing in “shovel-worthy” infrastructure, not just “shovel-ready” projects, to ensure that historic public investments expand access to well-being in fair and lasting ways. He was senior advisor and co-founder of What Works Plus, a collaborative of leading philanthropic donors promoting opportunity and community resilience through America’s major public investments in infrastructure and economic development. 

Briggs’ books include “The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America,” which won planning’s top book award; “Democracy as Problem Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities Across the Globe,” a four-nation comparative study short-listed for the C. Wright Mills Award for best social science book on a social problem; and “Moving to Opportunity: The Story of an American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty” winner of the Louis Brownlow Award. His writing and views have appeared in The New York Times, Time, The Boston Globe, CNN, Fortune, Fast Company, The American Prospect, Planning Magazine, and other media, in English and Spanish. 

Briggs serves on the boards of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Dēmos, JUST Capital, and One Fair Wage, as well as the steering committee for the nonpartisan Resilience Roadmap Project. 

Prior to joining Brookings, Briggs served for six years as vice president of the Ford Foundation, redesigning and managing its inclusive economies and markets work globally, along with regional program teams based in China, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. He led the foundation’s efforts to develop an actionable framework for understanding and challenging the drivers of inequality in our world, and also to build the field of impact investing and commit $1 billion of endowment assets, the largest-ever for a private foundation, for that purpose. 

Previously, Briggs was professor of sociology and urban planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From January 2009 to August 2011, he helped run the White House Office of Management and Budget as program associate director handling policy, budget, and management issues for roughly half the cabinet agencies of the federal government and many independent agencies. 

Earlier in his career, Briggs worked as a community planner in six low-income neighborhoods in the South Bronx, leading a project team that emphasized equitable and sustainable investment and that won the American Planning Association’s top award; a senior policy official at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he helped negotiate the redevelopment of public housing and lead the design of new economic development programs to generate impact investment in low-income rural and urban communities; and a faculty member at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. 

An elected member of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and the National Academy of Public Administration, he holds an engineering degree from Stanford University, an MPA from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in sociology and education from Columbia University, and was a Rotary Scholar at the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil.