Marc Schindler
Research Professor of the Practice and Senior Fellow
For over 35 years, Marc has worked on behalf of young people in a variety of leadership roles, including as a youth justice administrator, non-profit executive director, attorney, advocate, and partner at a philanthropic fund.
At CYJ, Marc will lead a new initiative–Forgotten Children: Unearthing the Lives Behind the Lost Burial Sites of Incarcerated Youth–designed to restore dignity to forgotten incarcerated youth buried in unmarked graves across the US. Marc will also support several other CYJ initiatives, including the Public Information Officers Learning Collaborative and the Transforming Juvenile Probation Certificate Program.
Most recently, Marc served as the Assistant Secretary and Chief of Staff for the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services, the cabinet-level youth justice agency in the state of Maryland, where he worked to shape the system in line with a more developmental and community-centered approach. More than twenty years prior to serving in this role, Marc was one of the key leaders of the reforms to the Washington, DC youth justice system, where he served as Interim Director, Chief of Staff, and General Counsel for the District’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS).
A lawyer by background, Marc has worked as a public defender representing children in Baltimore and as an attorney at the Youth Law Center, a national civil rights law firm working on behalf of children in youth justice and child welfare systems across the country. Marc has also served in leadership positions in the non-profit sector, including for a decade as Executive Director of the Justice Policy Institute, and in the philanthropic sector, including as a Partner at Venture Philanthropy Partners, where he directed efforts to support youth-serving nonprofit organizations in the national capital region. He previously served as an Adjunct Professor at George Washington University and at American University’s law school. He has also authored or co-authored more than twenty-five published research reports or papers.
He has a B.A. in Political Science from Yale University, and a J.D. from the University of Maryland School of Law. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and is the proud father of two college aged children.