Jason Mangone Headshot

Jason Mangone

Executive Director

Princeton, NJ

Jason Mangone is the Executive Director of More in Common US. He began his career as an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps, and following his military service was a Research Associate at the Council on Foreign Relations. After graduate school Jason was Director of the Aspen Institute’s Franklin Project, an initiative to make a year of national service a common expectation for every young American. He led the Franklin Project’s merger with two other non-profits, resulting in the creation of the Service Year Alliance, where Jason was Chief Operating Officer.

He then spent a year helping to build New York City’s Department of Veterans’ Services as a Senior Advisor to the agency’s Commissioner. He co-authored the national best-selling book Leaders: Myth and Reality, which the Financial Times named a “Best Business Book of 2018.” His writing has also been published, among other outlets, in the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Task & Purpose, and Philadelphia Inquirer. Most recently, Jason was CEO of Newbury Franklin Home Services, a niche home maintenance business.

He lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife Kara and their three kids, where he serves on the board of the Princeton Little League and is a volunteer firefighter, a pursuit meant to trick his children into thinking he’s still cool. He’s also on the board of New Politics, which recruits and trains military veterans and alumni of national service programs to run for elected office. He has a B.A. from Boston College and an M.A. in Global Affairs from Yale University.

Favorite MiC Finding:

In our study Promising Revelations, we found that Gen Z reports the same rates of church attendance as Baby Boomers. I also find the concept in that report of “Collateral Contempt” to be a very powerful lens of analysis, and one that we’ll think about using in other areas outside of religion.

Source: Promising Revelations

Why: On the first point, asking people to self-report whether or not they attend religious services is not the same thing as going to a bunch of Temples, Churches, Synagogues and Mosques, and collecting the demographic information of those actually in attendance. But it does tell you that people responding want to be perceived as being the sort of person who attends religious services. As I’ve spoken with various groups of young people in the past year, I’ve noticed that many talk about their religious background in a way that would have seemed anachronistic even 5 or 10 years ago, and they also talk about where they attend church wherever they’re at school. I know that the sorts of people who would show up to see me talk are predisposed to be institutionalists, but it nevertheless gives me hope that we’re at the beginning of an institutional revival, if not a religious revival. On Collateral Contempt, I think there are a lot of ways in which our politics has corrupted our ability to use culture as a tool to allow people from different backgrounds to hold surprising areas of commonality. I’m very interested in exploring the other ways this plays out.