For nearly 30 years, gabriel has contributed to a wide range of collaborative grassroots movements as an organizer, facilitator, strategist, and trainer. He’s developed and led numerous successful campaigns for criminal justice and drug policy reform.  In his writing and public talks, he explores organizing and the day-to-day work of regular people coming together to make change.

In 2015, gabriel cofounded the Katal Center for Equity, Health and Justice. The nonprofit launched in 2016 and works to develop intergenerational leadership and organizing capacity to build community-based power and win systemic change. Over the past 10 years, Katal’s organizing has brought thousands of people into the movement to end mass incarceration, trained new organizers, and won historic reforms to reduce the number of people in jails, in prisons, and on parole. In New York, Katal led or co-led winning campaigns to secure New York City’s 2017 commitment to close Rikers, pass historic bail reforms in 2019, pass the historic Less Is More parole reform act in 2021, and the reforms in 2025 to overhaul the state agency with investigative and oversight authority over local jails and state prisons.

From 2013 to 2016, gabriel co-led the effort to build and launch a pre-arrest diversion program in Albany, anchored in the principles of harm reduction and racial equity. Katal facilitated the program’s governing table until 2019. In 2016, he cofounded the LEAD National Support Bureau to provide technical assistance to municipalities seeking to establish similar programs.

Before launching Katal, gabriel was the managing director of policy & campaigns at the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), a national advocacy organization dedicated to ending the war on drugs. Over 12 years at DPA, gabriel collaborated with grassroots groups throughout the country to build people-powered campaigns to end the drug war, with a deep focus on New York, Connecticut, and Alabama. In New York, he developed and led successful campaigns to roll back the Rockefeller Drug Laws and expand access to drug treatment; pass legislation to improve public health and prevent accidental overdose deaths; end the NYPD’s racially biased marijuana arrest crusade; and others. He established DPA’s New York Policy Office, which became a model for the organization.

Previously, gabriel served as a session aide in the Washington State Senate. He worked for years in food service, including as a line cook; in construction; and as a peer counselor for low-income college students. He first got involved in activism in the mid-1990s, and was fortunate to have mentors who steered him into community organizing for racial justice, queer liberation, ending domestic violence, and establishing fair and just economies.

gabriel and his work have appeared in a broad range of broadcast, online, and print media, including The New York Times, Spectrum News NY1, MSNBC, Fox News, NBC, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Atlantic, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and the BBC, as well as in scores of community-based outlets in New York City and elsewhere. For the book Decarcerating America: From Mass Punishment to Public Health, he wrote a chapter about how drug policy reform can contribute to meaningful decarceration. He has coauthored reports with the New York Academy of Medicine, the ACLU, the Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College, the Prison Policy Initiative, and others.

gabriel has been a guest speaker and trainer throughout the United States and in Europe. From 2010 to 2012, he was a lecturer at the Columbia University School of Social Work. From 2011 to 2014, he worked as a community outreach adviser for The House I Live In, a Sundance Film Festival award-winning documentary about the war on drugs. In a 2014 TEDx talk, gabriel described his own struggle with drug use and the connections among addiction, the war on drugs, mass incarceration, and systemic racism.

Thanks to Pell Grants and the guidance of elders, he attended community college and later obtained a bachelor of arts degree from The Evergreen State College. gabriel holds a master’s in public health from the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy. In 2014, VOCAL-NY honored him with the Bob Kohler VOCAL for Justice Award. In 2025, City & State New York named him a Nonprofit Trailblazer. He serves on the board of the Katal Center and the Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund and has previously served on the boards of the Maple Street School, the New York Foundation, and Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide.

gabriel grew up in Northern California and now lives with his family in Brooklyn.

Select Publications by gabriel sayegh:

• Rikers Island and Mental Health: Pathways Toward Community-Based Diversion and Jail Population Reduction (2025)
• Excessive, Unjust, and Expensive: Fixing Connecticut’s Probation and Parole Problems (2023)
• New York’s Less Is More Act: One-Year Anniversary Report (2022)
• Navigating the Perils of Community Supervision – and Working Together to Make Change(2022)
• Making Sense of the Fight over NYC Jails (2019)
• Making Sense of Bail Reform in NYS, Part 1 and Part 2 (2019)
• Reflections and Lessons from the First Two Phases of the #CLOSErikers Campaign: August 2015 – August 2017 (2018)
• Blueprint for a Public Health and Safety Approach to Drug Policy (the subject of a New York Times editorial) (2013)
• Healthcare Not Handcuffs: Putting the Affordable Care Act to Work for Criminal Justice and Drug Law Reform (2013)
• One Million Police Hours: Making 440,000 Marijuana Possession Arrests in New York City, 002–2012 (2013)