Brennan Center for Justice Leadership

John Anthony (Tony) Butler is chief operating officer for the Brennan Center. He is responsible for the organization’s financial and operational activities, including oversight of information technology, the corporate legal function and strategic planning process.

Butler has over 25 years of business and financial management experience in government, not-for-profit and for-profit organizations. Prior to joining the Brennan Center in 2011, Butler served as chief financial officer for Legal Services NYC (LS-NYC), the largest provider of free civil legal services to low-income people in the United States.

In 1998, he founded a management consultant business that served for-profit and not-for profit clientele in the areas of operational assessment and strategic planning. Prior to that, he served as vice president for finance and administration at the National Urban League. In the early 1990s, New York City Mayor David Dinkins appointed him as deputy city personnel director for administration and budget, after his service as deputy director of the NYC Redistricting Commission.

Butler began his career in management information systems at the investment bank of Morgan Stanley & Company. Immediately after business school, he spent a year in Caracas, Venezuela, as business representative for the Caribbean for Reuters, Inc. He served as treasurer on the Board of Directors for Brooklyn Plaza Medical Center, a 501c(3) federally funded community health center in Brooklyn, New York, and as treasurer on the Board of Directors for the Algebra Project, Inc., a national nonprofit dedicated to math literacy for underserved populations.

Butler was a Kellogg Foundation National Leadership Program Fellow (1997-2000) and a recipient of the Thomas K. Bradshaw Fellowship in the Humanities for Young Professionals at Claremont Graduate School. He earned an AB from Harvard College and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Jeanine Chirlin is the Brennan Center’s chief of staff. She manages the Office of the President and Board relations, assists the president in a variety of initiatives, supports the leadership team, drives key special projects and partnerships, and oversees the organization’s annual retreat.

Chirlin previously served in a variety of roles at the Brennan Center, including director of special projects, where she helped launch the Center’s events series. In that role, she also helped convene civic, philanthropic, cultural and business leaders for New York campaign finance reform and oversaw an internal communications initiative in the wake of organizational growth. Prior to this, she served as the Center’s vice president of Communications and Strategy, where she oversaw media relations, publications, digital strategy, promotional content creation, and public events. In this role, Chirlin was integral to raising the Center’s national profile and shaping the public debate on democracy and justice issues in the media, through the Center’s newsletters and public events. In 2013, she served on the Board-staff steering committee for a five-year strategic planning process, and in 2015, she edited, with Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, Legal Change: Lessons from America’s Social Movements. She has a BA with honors from Northeastern University, and an MA from Columbia University.