Alan began his career as a social worker in the family policing system, where he worked as an investigative caseworker and administrator. Today his work focuses on ending the harm that results from this system.

In 2020, Alan helped to create and launch the upEND Movement, a collaborative effort dedicated to abolishing the family policing system and building alternatives that focus on healing and liberation. He is also the co-founder and co-facilitator of Toward Liberation, an abolitionist learning and study group.

Alan is author of Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System: The Case for Abolition, published by Oxford University Press in 2023. He is also the co-founding editor of Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal dedicated to developing and disseminating an abolitionist praxis in social work.

His most recent book, Making the Child Welfare System Obsolete: A Memoir of Family Separation and State Violence, traces his journey from a social worker who believed he was protecting children to an abolitionist reckoning with the violence he participated in and the harms he once understood as necessary for keeping children safe. By revisiting his experiences in the family policing system, he examines how this transformation reshaped his understanding of state violence and what it means to work toward liberation.