Senior Fellow, Brookings Metro
Xavier (Xav) de Souza Briggs is a senior fellow at Brookings Metro. He is also a senior advisor and co-founder of What Works Plus, a collaborative of philanthropic donors promoting equity and resilience through America’s generational investments in infrastructure and climate action. An award-winning educator and researcher, he is also an experienced leader in philanthropy and government.
Briggs is an expert on economic opportunity and inclusive growth, racial equity and pluralism, housing, urban and regional development, and democratic governance in the U.S. and abroad. Briggs 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 the way government works.
Briggs’ books include The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America, Democracy as Problem Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities Across the Globe, and Moving to Opportunity: The Story of an American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty. His writing and views have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, CNN, Fortune, Fast Company, Planning magazine, and other major media, in English and in Spanish.
Briggs serves on the boards of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, Dēmos, JUST Capital, and One Fair Wage, as well as the steering committee for the nonpartisan Resilience Roadmap Project.
An elected member of the National Academy of Public Administration, he holds an engineering degree from Stanford University, an master’s in public administration from Harvard, and a doctorate of philosophy in sociology and education from Columbia University. He was also a visiting graduate fellow at the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil.