Alula Asfaw is an author and civic leader based in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the founder and board chair of Bonds of Union and is leading a national campaign to build a civic research and development infrastructure for American renewal.

Bonds of Union is a nonprofit building the research and innovation infrastructure that the country's most persistent civic challenges have long lacked. Its premise is simple: strengthening civic and democratic life deserves the same disciplined research and development—anchored at universities, tested across regions, and held to meaningful standards of evidence—that the country brings to medicine, technology, and industry.

Alula's work spans nearly two decades across the nonprofit, philanthropic, academic, and public sectors. He helped lead the Obama administration's innovation agenda at the U.S. Department of Education, served as an education policy adviser with USAID in Haiti, and founded the University of Washington Dream Project. Across these roles, he has worked with leading civic, educational, and philanthropic institutions to turn ambitious ideas into durable forms of public action.

Beneath this work is a single, enduring preoccupation. For years, Alula has thought and written about purpose, obligation, sacrifice, and the demands of democratic life—and, more personally, about what it asks of a person to live one coherent moral life in a world that often rewards fragmentation. That question connects his civic work and his writing, and it lies at the heart of his first book.

Between Justice and Reality: On Moral Formation and Civic Purpose, which he is currently completing, is a work of literary nonfiction organized around one governing question: What happens to a person who tries to live coherently when reality stops cooperating with that coherence?

His second book, Because of Them, is a children's picture book about goodness, inheritance, and the people whose sacrifices make our lives possible.

As an extension of nearly two decades of civic work and writing, Alula is also developing Conversations Between Justice and Reality, a series of gatherings that will create space for people to reflect together on the tensions between ideals and circumstances, conviction and consequence, in their own lives.

Alula is a graduate of the University of Washington, the University of Cambridge, where he earned an MPhil in Politics, Development, and Democratic Education, and Yale Law School, where he earned his JD. In 2023, he delivered the Distinguished Alumnus Address at the University of Washington's commencement.

He is the father of four daughters.