Joey Hasson

Joey is currently a Senior Programme Officer for Human Rights at Sigrid Rausing Trust, a London-based foundation which promotes the values and principles of human rights, equality and the rule of law, and aims to preserve nature from further degradation. He has spent over a decade working with grassroots movements and political campaigns that challenge systemic inequalities, in both South Africa and the UK.

In 2003, Joey met anti-apartheid and AIDS activist Zackie Achmat. Achmat had founded the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a grassroots movement of people living with HIV fighting the South African government for access to life-saving antiretroviral treatment. Between 2003 and 2008, he worked alongside TAC activists to develop community health organising and advocacy capacities. Joey subsequently worked for the South African Labour Research Institute at the South African Clothing and Textile Workers Union in Cape Town, building a coalition to try and stem clothing industry job losses. During this period he also established an organisation promoting active engagement and dialogue between Jewish and Muslim youth in Cape Town.

Inspired by the TAC example of social mobilisation, policy advocacy and strategic litigation to impact lives and reduce inequality, Joey co-founded Equal Education (EE) in 2008. EE is a movement of thousands of high school-learners campaigning for equitable state education in South Africa. Over 5 years he led the movement’s youth and campaigns strategy and later its policy, research and training department, which led to the adoption of a national school infrastructure policy prioritising the poorest schools in 2013. EE is today among the largest democratic organisations of students, teachers and parents across urban townships and rural schools in South Africa.

Joey moved to the United Kingdom in 2012 to work as campaign coordinator of two multi-country socio-economic and cultural rights campaigns with Amnesty International. The first focused on housing rights and forced evictions in Kenya, Nigeria, Italy, Romania and Brazil; the second focused on sexual and reproductive health rights in Ireland, Burkina Faso, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. In 2015 Joey helped establish the Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education in Cape Town, South Africa. Prior to joining Sigrid Rausing Trust, Joey was Activist Training Manager at 100 Million, a campaign that brings together young activists to effect change for the world’s most marginalised children.

Joey has an undergraduate degree in Psychology and Social Anthropology from the University of Cape Town and is a graduate of the MSc in Inequalities and Social Science programme at LSE.