Alex Duran

Alelur “Alex” Duran serves as Program Director at Galaxy Gives, where he leads the foundation’s criminal justice reform portfolio. He sits on the boards of Freedom Reads, the Center for Community Alternatives, and the Medical Justice Alliance, organizations dedicated to transforming conditions of confinement and driving decarceration. He is also a co-producer of the HBO documentary The Alabama Solution.

Before joining Galaxy Gives, Alex worked at the Open Society Foundations as a program specialist supporting grantmaking aimed at ending mass incarceration. His path in philanthropy began at the Ford Foundation, where he served as a business associate working to confront inequality in all its forms.

Sentenced to 14 years in prison at a young age, Alex carries firsthand knowledge of the violent, oppressive structures he is now committed to dismantling. He holds a BA from Bard College, where his senior thesis, Gang Exportation and the Reproduction of Violence: The Trinitarios in the Crucible of Mass Incarceration, examined the ways imprisonment fuels cycles of violence and the spread of gang culture beyond U.S. borders.

Born in Harlem and raised in the Boogie Down Bronx, Alex is a student of history, guided by an enduring belief in the struggle to help bend the moral arc toward justice.