Jacqueline C. Rivers is the executive director at of the Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies. She has lectured at Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania, the American Enterprise Institute, the Vatican, the United Nations, and in several other venues. She served as a Hutchins Fellow at Harvard University. Her latest publication appears in the volume Not Just Good but Beautiful. She has also published a chapter, written with leading sociologist Orlando Patterson, in The Cultural Matrix.

Rivers is the former executive director of MathPower, an education consulting organization she founded and which became an influential voice in mathematics education reform foe low income, minority students in the Boston Public Schools. This project arose out of her work with Bob Moses of the Algebra Project and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She has worked om issues of social justice and Christian activism in the black community for more than thirty years, committing her personal and professional life in service to the inner city youth of Boston.

Jacqueline Rivers holds a PhD from Harvard University where she was a Doctoral Fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy of the J. F. Kennedy School of Government and Graduate Research Fellow of the National Science Foundation. She graduated from Harvard Radcliff College (B.A.  summa cum laude, Phil Beta Kappa and M.A., both in Psychology).

Jacqueline Rivers has lived and worked among the poor for thirty years. She was born and raised in Jamaica and now lives in Dorchester with her husband, Reverend Eugene F. Rivers, III.