Ms. Jones Austin has chaired and served on several influential boards and commissions, including serving as Co-Chair of NYC Mayor de Blasio's Transition, Chair of the NYC Procurement Policy Board, and Co-Chair of the New York State Supermarket Commission. She currently is a Board Member of the National Action Network, the New York Blood Center, the NYC Board of Correction, and the Fund for Public Housing.

In 2014, Stanley was recognized by the Obama administration as a Champion of Change for his commitment to helping individuals impacted by the justice system. He also became the first formerly incarcerated person to be appointed by the City Council Speaker and serves as Vice Chair to the NYC Board of Correction, a regulatory oversight body for setting minimum standards of care, custody and control of people incarcerated in New York City jails. In June 2020, Stanley was appointed to lead the Working Group to End Punitive Segregation. Other appointments include the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform chaired by former NYS Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, which created and released a blueprint, “A More Just New York City”, for the future of criminal justice in New York City; the Working Group on Design, a subcommittee of the Justice Implementation Task Force, to ensure effective implementation of the “Smaller, Safer, Fairer: A Roadmap to Closing Rikers Island” initiative; the New York City Disconnected Youth Task Force which effort aims to examine the barriers that out-of-school and out-of-work youth face in enrolling in school or being employed; and the New York City Older Adult Reentry Task Force which will issue recommendations to address issues related to the post-incarceration reentry for older adults. He serves on a number of other committees and boards as well. Stanley graduated from Medaille College and completed the Columbia University, Graduate School of Business, Institute for Not-For-Profit Management, Executive Level Program and the Robert Wood Johnson Fellowship Program.

Nick previously served at Vera from 1998 to 2007. During his first tenure, he developed ideas for demonstration projects aimed at keeping troubled youth out of the justice system and easing reentry for adult prisoners. He also guided the expansion of Vera’s national work, launching and directing Vera’s state sentencing and corrections initiative, while supervising Vera’s domestic violence projects and the creation of its youth justice program. As vice president and chief program officer, Nick was responsible for the development and launch of the Prosecution and Racial Justice Program and the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons. Prior to re-joining Vera, Nick was a managing director at The Rockefeller Foundation, where he was a member of the foundation’s senior leadership team and a co-leader of its global urban efforts. He provided leadership and strategic direction on key initiatives, including transportation policy reform in the U.S. to promote social, economic, and environmental interests, and redevelopment in New Orleans to advance racial and socioeconomic integration. Earlier in his legal career, Nick was an associate in the litigation department of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York from 1997 to 1998. He was a judicial clerk for the Honorable Jack. B. Weinstein, Senior United States District Judge in Brooklyn from 1996 to 1997. Before attending Yale Law School, he worked with court-involved, homeless, and troubled young people at Sasha Bruce Youthwork, a Washington, DC youth services organization, from 1989 to 1993. Nick is author of several op-eds, including “A Home After Prison” (the New York Times), “What We Learned from German Prisons” (with Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the New York Times), “The Steep Cost of America’s High Incarceration Rate” (with Robert Rubin, co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former U.S. Treasury secretary, the Wall Street Journal) and “Treating Prisoners with Dignity Can Reduce Crime” (with John Wetzel, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, National Journal’s The Next America). He has also published a number of articles on criminal justice, including Politics, Public Service, and Professionalism: Conflicting Themes in the Invention and Evaluation of Community Prosecution (with Chris Stone, 1999) and “The Cost of Avoiding Injustice by Guideline Circumventions,” in Federal Sentencing Reporter (with the Honorable Jack B. Weinstein, 1997). In 2015, Nick joined the advisory council of the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, a new, independent nonprofit aiming to eliminate the gaps in opportunity and achievement for boys and young men of color. He currently serves on the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform and the Advisory Board to New York City’s Children’s Cabinet. Nick has previously served on the boards of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, Living Cities, Center for Working Families, and St. Christopher’s Inc.