Addrana Montgomery is a staff attorney with the Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center where she works on preservation of affordable housing in New York City. Addrana has championed social justice movements across the globe, including in Southern Africa, where she served as one of the youngest overseas election monitors for South Africa’s first democratic election.  Witnessing South Africa’s transition to a post-apartheid, majority-led government inspired her to use the law to effect social change. During her clerkship at the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the country’s apex court, she wrote and drafted opinions ranging from housing and land use cases to the right of cultural expression in public schools, all within a human rights legal paradigm.  Her work at the Court continues to inspire and inform her human and civil rights legal and political activism in this country.  In between her legal work, Addrana has worked on and organized several national, New York City-wide and local political campaigns.

Professor Akbar received her B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University, and her J.D. from the University of Michigan, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Michigan Law Review. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersections of national security and criminal law, and on the functioning of the contemporary punitive state. She has written extensively on the role of counter-radicalization in shaping national security policing and prosecutions. Underlying her research is an effort to understand the relationships between law and legal discourse, policing, and inequality. Her clinical practice is focused on law and organizing for marginalized communities. With her students, she has litigated in state, federal, and transnational forums against domestic and foreign governments for human and civil rights abuses, researched and written community-based human rights reports, and collaborated with community organizations in campaigns for public education and collective change.

Jeena Shah is a Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law - Newark, where she teaches the Constitutional Rights and International Human Rights Clinics. She is co-lead counsel on a lawsuit brought by Sexual Minorities Uganda, an umbrella organization for LGBTI-led groups in Uganda, against a U.S.-based anti-gay extremist for contributing to the persecution of Uganda's queer community.  She also currently represents four Iraqi men in their lawsuit against a U.S. military contract for torture at Abu Ghraib.  Jeena has worked closely with organizers and oppressed communities in New York, Iraq, India, and Haiti, appeared on TV and radio news programs and authored several op-eds discussing issues of U.S. militarism and imperialism, and co-designed a training on movement lawyering. 

Donald Anthonyson was born in Antigua. He is involved in civil society and social issues in Antigua and the Caribbean. He is a member and past president of the Environmental Awareness Group (EAG), the largest environmental group in the Eastern Caribbean. He is also a member of the NGO Network (ANU), which he has represented at forums including the CARICOM Heads of Government meetings and the EU/ACP trade and development meetings. He is also involved in community organizing of the Antiguan Diaspora in New York. Donald migrated to the US in 1979 and has been involved in various social issues ranging from police brutality (Elenanor Bumphus Justice Committee) and anti-racial responses (NYASA) to immigration. At Families For Freedom, Donald was a former Board member and led the efforts of the International Deportee Justice Campaign and produced for their monthly radio show on 99.5 FM WBAI.

Fahd Ahmed came to the United States from Pakistan as an undocumented and working-class immigrant in 1991. He has been a grassroots organizer on the issues of racial profiling, immigrant justice, police accountability, and national security over the last 15 years. Fahd has been active with DRUM (Desis Rising Up & Moving) since 2000, when he had family members facing deportation, entrapment, and incarceration as part of the War on Drugs. Within DRUM, Fahd co-led the work with Muslim, Arab, and South Asian immigrant detainees before, and immediately after 9/11, by coordinating the detainee visitation program. Over the last 4 years, as the Legal and Policy Director at DRUM, Fahd ran the End Racial Profiling Campaign and brought together the coalitions working on Muslim surveillance, and stop and frisk, to work collaboratively to pass the landmark Community Safety Act. Fahd recently became the Executive Director of DRUM.

Subhash Kateel is a writer, communicator and radio show host of Let's Talk About It!, a real talk radio program that talks about the real issues that affect the lives of real people. Subhash Kateel was a community organizer in immigrant communities for over twelve years. He co-founded and co-directed Families For Freedom, a multi-ethnic network of immigrants facing and fighting deportation. Before that, he helped initiate detention and deportation work for DRUM-Desis Rising Up and Moving. In Miami, Subhash served as an organizer with the Florida Immigrant Coalition helping to develop community responses to ICE raids, detentions and deportations.

Besides facilitating some of the most sought after know your rights trainings in the South East, he helped lead the We Are Florida! campaign that successfully stopped an Arizona-style anti-immigrant bill from passing in the Florida legislature. Subhash writes extensively on issues ranging from immigration and criminal justice to mental health, economic justice and gun control. When he isn't writing or talking on the radio, Subhash is helping emerging leaders in Miami to develop their voice and leading workshops around the country to help social justice leaders communicate effectively. He has called many places home, including Saginaw, Michigan, Brooklyn, New York and now Miami, Florida.

Colette Pichon Battle, Esq., Executive Director/Attorney, Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy

Colette Pichon Battle, Esq. is a native of Louisiana who, over the past nine years, has worked with local communities, national funders and elected officials around equity in the post-Katrina/post-BP disaster Gulf Coast.  In 2007 Colette received recognition from the American Bar Association and in 2008 she was awarded the U.S. Civilian Medal of Honor for the state of Louisiana- both awards were for her work around multi-racial, cross regional alliance building in the Katrina recovery.  In 2012, Colette was named an “Expert of Color” by the Insight Center for Community Economic Development on issues that surround the US racial wealth divide. In 2014 Colette was selected for the Young Climate Justice National Fellowship based on her work with coastal communities of color. In 2015 Colette was selected as an Echoing Green Climate Fellow.

Currently, Colette serves as Director of the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy (GCCLP) managing programs focused on Global Migration, Community Economic Development, Climate Justice and Equitable Disaster Recovery.  She works to develop regional and state advocacy initiatives, manages and provides legal services and oversees training and analysis development for local community leaders on issues that intersect with race, systems of power and ecology.   Colette’s legal specialization is in immigration and disaster law.  Ms. Pichon Battle is a lead coordinator for Gulf South Rising 2015 a regional initiative around climate justice in the South.

Ms. Pichon Battle earned her Bachelor’s Degree in International Studies from Kenyon College, is a former Thomas J. Watson Fellow and a graduate of the Southern University Law Center.  She serves on the board for the US Climate Action Network (USCAN) and has served on the national steering committee for the Black Immigration Network (BIN).  Colette is a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), National Lawyers Guild, Experts of Color Network and her local NAACP and League of Women Voters chapters.

Felipe Sousa-Rodriguez was born to a single mother in Brazil, who sent him at age 14 to Miami, FL, where he first dreamed of becoming a teacher. He started organizing on immigrant rights issues in 2007 while he served as student government president at Miami Dade College. He walked on the Trail of Dreams in 2010 to draw attention to the need for the DREAM Act and to push for an end to deportations. Felipe worked with Presente.org to build online strategies that connected with local community interest and he is a founding member of the National Coordinating Committee at UWD, where he represented the Southeast region.

Felipe has spent two years working at GetEQUAL, a national social justice LGBTQ organization. He has become a leading voice on the intersection of LGBTQ issues and immigrant rights. At GetEQUAL, he served as National Field Director and Co-director. Now he is the Deputy Managing Director at United We Dream. He holds an A.A. in International Relations from Miami Dade College and graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.A. in Business Studies and a minor in Economics from St Thomas University.

Felipe was awarded the “Freedom From Fear” award from Public Interest Projects in 2011 for his work on the Trail of Dreams, he was named one of the “Top 15 Civil Rights Leaders of the 21st Century” by News One and “20 Queer People of Color You Should Know” by Out Smart Magazine. He was also listed by The Advocate as one of the “40 under 40″ list of LGBTQ leaders in 2013, and he is proud to have received YP4’s Iara Peng’s Alumini award. He has a long record of pressuring both Democrats (see here) and Republicans (see here) for progress on Latino and LGBTQ issues. Some of the successful campaigns he participated that led to concrete change for millions of low-income people in the US include administrative relief from deportation for young people also known as DACA, the executive action to protect LGBTQ people working for federal contractors, and the most recent victory in winning relief from deportation for millions of families also known as DAPA.

Prior to coming on staff at the Brooklyn Movement Center, Mark was on the Faculty of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and was most recently the field organizer for the MOVE NY campaign. A Central Brooklyn native, Mark Winston Griffith is the former Executive Director and Senior Fellow for Economic Justice at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, and the former co-director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project. In the early nineties he co-founded the Central Brooklyn Partnership and Central Brooklyn Federal Credit Union. He currently serves on the boards of the Brooklyn Cooperative Federal Credit Union, Center for an Urban Future, the Center for Working Families, Little Sun People and Free Speech TV. Mark loves spending time with his family, running the streets of New York like a steeplechase, and describing how he acquired the 18 inch scar that runs the length of his spine. 

Seema Sadanandan is the Criminal Justice Director at ACLU of the Nation’s Capital. She joined the ACLU-NCA in 2013 and oversees non-litigation advocacy efforts in defending civil rights and liberties in the District. Seema leads the organization’s efforts in combatting discrimination and addressing other issues that have a disproportionate impact on communities of color, such as the enforcement of the District’s marijuana laws and the need for decriminalization. Prior to joining the ACLU, Seema was a documentary filmmaker and campaign strategist for social movements in the United States and abroad. She is a graduate of American University’s Washington College of Law and Tulane University.

Marbre joined the Center for Popular Democracy as a Soros Justice Fellow in Fall 2013. Her Soros Justice work focuses on organizing and working with  families affected by aggressive policing and criminal justice policies in New York City in order to develop meaningful bottom up policy reforms. Marbre also works extensively on police and criminal justice reform with partners across the country. Marbre received her Juris Doctorate from Yale Law School in May 2013.  While in law school, Marbre focused on the intersection of criminal justice and civil rights and gained legal experience with the Bronx Defenders, the Equal Justice Initiative and the Prison Policy Initiative.  Before law school Marbre received her Master’s in African Studies from Oxford University and worked in Zimbabwe organizing communities impacted by violence and then in South Africa teaching at Nelson Mandela’s alma mater. Marbre graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University, with a BA in African-American History and Human Rights.

Alana Greer joined the Florida Legal Services in July 2014 and co-founded the Community Justice Project, Inc. in 2015. From 2011-2014 she was with the Advancement Project in Washington, DC, where she worked with youth and parent leaders across the nation to put an end to the School-to-Prison Pipeline. Originally from Miami, Alana left Florida to attend Boston College and Harvard Law School, where she was a student attorney at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. Prior to law school, she was a member of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and worked with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area as a Homeless Rights Paralegal. Alana is passionate about lifting up the voices of the community members she works with and using her legal and analytic skills to support grassroots movements seeking to dismantle structural racism and inequality.

Scott Roberts is the Senior Campaign Manager at Advancement Project. A native of Emporia, VA, Scott studied political science at Morehouse College and the University of Chicago. Before joining Advancement Project in the fall of 2011, he worked as and organizer and strategist on electoral and issue campaigns including the 2008 Obama campaign and efforts for worker’s rights, healthcare, marriage equality, immigrant rights and democratic reform. As a resident of Suitland, MD, Scott is engaged in numerous local social justice efforts in Washington, DC and Prince George’s County, MD. - See more at: http://www.advancementproject.org/people/entry/scott-roberts#sthash.IlgvgOsW.dpuf

Oren Nimni is an author, organizer and people's lawyer in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the current chair of The United People of Color Caucus (TUPOCC) of the National Lawyers' Guild and is director of People's Law Project. Oren is heavily involved in the struggle against police brutality and poverty, he represents clients and conducts trainings for those involved in CopWatch, workers' and tenants rights organizations and the prison abolition movement.

Carl Williams joined the ACLU of Massachusetts as staff attorney in September 2013. He was previously a criminal defense attorney with the Roxbury Defenders Unit of the Committee for Public Counsel Services. A long-time resident of Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, he has been an activist and organizer on issues of war, immigrants’ rights, LGBT rights, racial justice and Palestinian self-determination. Carl is a member of the National Lawyers Guild and has served on its Massachusetts board of directors. During the Occupy Boston movement he was part of its legal defense and support team, which provided nearly 24-hour support to the participants.

After helping to build and fortify legal support systems and infrastructure in New York, St. Louis and Baltimore, Nathan Sheard co-founded the Black Movement-Law Project. BMLP provides legal support training, and aids in the building of effective support infrastructure, to local communities throughout the country as they demonstrate against police brutality and systemic racism.

Growing up in New York, Nathan spent much of his formative years in both Long Island's "Gold Coast" and the Crown Heights Section of Brooklyn. The experience of biased policing in both settings laid the foundation for and motivates much of his work. In addition to his work with BMLP, Nathan continues to organize with Mutant Legal activist collective and to serve on the board and volunteer with Just Info (a 24-hour hotline providing no-cost legal information in New York City). Through these efforts Nathan has worked effectively to help activist and communities mitigate the damage of harmful interaction with law.

A native of Harlem, New York, Iman Freeman is an attorney who is actively involved in the Baltimore Legal Defense Committee, an organization that provides legal support to Baltimore communities as they exercise their civil liberties protesting against injustices rooted in structural racism and economic inequality. After law school, Iman left the government to serve as a Field Organizer with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), where she registered thousands of voters. When tragedy struck in Baltimore, she answered the call to provide volunteer legal services and never left.

Jill M Humphries, PhD is a Solutions Based Consultant whose expertise spans public / private partnerships and complex service delivery systems in urban communities. She has planned, implemented and coordinated multiple, diverse evaluation projects that help advance desired community and client goals globally. In a consultative capacity, she assisted the National Lawyer’s Guild and the National Council of Black Lawyers New York City Chapters to enhance their legal observer programmatic performance. Dr. Humphries is also a founding member of the The Black Movement-Law Project that assists Black communities in the United States to help build sustainable local capacity to respond proactively to police brutality and systemic racism by providing comprehensive legal representation, legal observer training, and jail support services.

Nicole Lee is a human rights lawyer and thought leader. She is the immediate past president of TransAfrica. She was the first female President of TransAfrica, the nation’s premier African American foreign affairs organization. With her signature seriousness and compassion, she has led investigations and missions documenting violations of human rights and dignity of the world’s vulnerable populations. Ms. Lee has testified before Congress and served as a resource to government officials and members of the media on international policy issues affecting Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and racial minorities worldwide. She received Running Start’s Women to Watch Award in 2008 and has been on Ebony magazine’s list of 100 Most Influential African Americans. As an expert on Africa and the African Diaspora, Ms. Lee has authored numerous opinion pieces and appeared on ABC, NBC, CNN, BBC, NPR, Democracy Now, Voice of America and h undreds of TV and radio stations around the globe.

Sarah Coffey has done movement legal support for 15 years and was a founding member of the Midnight Special Law Collective. She answered the call for NLG Legal Observers in Ferguson a week after the death of Mike Brown and stayed for six months. During that time Sarah trained scores of Legal Observers, helped grow the St. Louis Legal Observer program and along with other activists, co-coordinated over 100 non-lawyer volunteers to offer legal support for protests that spanned months. Sarah is a board member of the Detroit and Michigan Chapter of the NLG and the Institute for Anarchist Studies. She works locally in Detroit on water rights, land justice and closing the digital divide, and nationally, to create a paradigm shift in power.

“I believe in the power of community to heal, correct and find solutions for the broken systems and pain we see around us,” said Nikkita Oliver, who refuses to sit back and watch individuals go without health services, live in poor conditions and suffer in unjust systems.

For Oliver public service goes beyond working for the common good. Since working on her undergraduate degree at Seattle Pacific University, Oliver has immersed herself in her pursuit of helping others. Starting as a youth outreach intern in Leadership Development and Community Development department within SPU’s John Perkins Center for Reconciliation, Oliver has worked to empower urban youth, a group that she said goes unheard.

“I will grow with them, suffer with them, listen with them and together we will move towards solutions,” she said.

Oliver believes that youth and their opinions are crucial to society’s well being and it is important to ensure that government systems and institutions benefit all ages, including those under the age of 18. The younger generations are the future and Oliver hopes that by encouraging them to participate in the processes of change and government this sidelined group can feel empowered and capable to be responsible citizens. 

Quanita McRoberts is an organizer with Ohio Student Association as well as an elected member of their Steering Committee. She has been involved with #BlackLivesMatter through organizing the Justice For John Crawford III with OSA. She strongly believes in operating from an intersectional view point that examines a person experience at the various intersection of their life.  In addition, Quanita graduated Fall 2014 with a degree in Liberal Studies with a social science concentration as well as two minors in African & African-American Studies, Women Studies, and a certificate in African-American and Gender Experience in Health Care. Much of what Quanita studied influenced and inspired her passion to organize around many social justice issues.

M. Adams is a community organizer and co-executive director of Freedom Inc., where she has been for seven years. Freedom Inc. works with low to no income Black and Hmong wimmin, queer folks and youth in Dane County. Born and raised in Milwaukee, Adams has been in Madison since 2003. Adams’s dad has been incarcerated most of her life and she comes from a community that has been the extreme targets of police violence. Adams, herself,  is also a proud dad to a 2 year old who is a primary motivator for her work.  As a queer Black person, Adams has developed and advocated for a strong intersectional approach in numerous important venues: Adams is a leading figure in the Take Back the Land Movement, she presented before the United Nations for the Convention on Eliminating Racial Discrimination, the co-Author of Forward from Ferguson and a work in progress on Black community control over the police, and author to intersectionality theory in Why Killing Unarmed Black folks is a Queer issue. Most recently, Adams can be seen in person, on TV or in the newspapers giving near weekly presentations, testifying and city council meetings, and energizing crowds at protests as a member of the Young, Gifted and Black Coalition

Jean-Luc was born in Haiti and moved to South Florida when he was eleven years old. As a participant in the University of Florida African American Studies Program, and troubled by the overrepresentation of people of color in the criminal justice system, he interned at the Gainesville Public Defender’s Office. His experience at the Public Defender’s office served as the inspiration for his senior thesis concerning the effects of the New Orleans charter school movement on African American students’ educational achievement. After college, Jean-Luc taught high school Spanish in the Mississippi Delta. Jean-Luc is a rising second year student at NYU School of Law and is currently interning at the Community Justice Project in Miami as part of CCR's Ella Baker Summer Internship Program.

Rodline is passionate about issues of social justice. She has worked in the areas of women’s rights, human rights and economic development. In the past, Rodline worked in equal employment opportunity compliance. This summer she worked at the Institute for Justice  & Democracy in Haiti where she contributed to advocacy efforts around the humanitarian crisis currently developing on the island of Hispaniola.

Stephanie Llanes is a third-year student at Berkeley Law from San Juan, Puerto Rico. She is a Research Assistant to john a. powell where her work focuses on structural racism, implicit bias, housing, opportunity, and social mobility. She obtained her bachelor’s degree from Emory University in Sociology and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. While there, she co-founded and organized a racial justice student coalition, Change @ Emory, to address the racially hostile campus environment. At Berkeley, Stephanie has served as the Co-President of the Latino Law Students Association, Articles Editor for the Journal for African American Law and Policy, advocate for the Post-Conviction Advocacy Clinic, and became a National Champion, as a member of the Board of Advocates Mock Trial Team. In 2014, Stephanie interned at the ACLU of Washington, where she worked on voting rights, abolition of the death penalty, and prisoners' rights. Stephanie is currently a 2015 Ella Baker intern at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) working on the government misconduct and racial justice docket.

Tyler Whittenberg has been a Staff Attorney with the Youth Law Center since August 2014, where he advocates for the rights of youth in the juvenile justice and foster care systems, with a particular emphasis on educational rights and conditions of confinement.  Tyler was driven to advocacy after experiencing the School-to-Prison Pipeline firsthand as both a student and middle school teacher in Columbia, South Carolina. After receiving a master’s in Politics and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, he worked to fight the re-segregation of North Carolina’s public school system as an Education Policy Fellow with the North Carolina Justice Center’s Education Law Project. While in law school, Tyler was an Ella Baker Fellow with the Center for Constitutional Rights and helped lead Stand Up for Each Other (SUFEO)—a student-led, direct advocacy organization that represents students who are wrongfully suspended and expelled from public schools in New Orleans. For these efforts, Tyler was awarded the Louisiana State Bar Association’s 2014 Student Pro Bono Award.

Grey has been organizing within the immigrant rights movement in FL since her days while  being undocumented in college. She was part of the logistical support for the Trail of Dreams, a direct action taken by 4 young undocumented youth pushing for legal relief, who walked from Miami to DC in the spring of 2010, in the wake of the DREAM Act failing. She has worked on several successful statewide organizing campaigns, including supporting cross sectoral mobilizations to the FL state capitol in 2011 to push back the SB1070 copycat law and in 2014, supporting undocumented youth win in-state tuition for the first time after 10 years of legislative and community lobbying. She has worked in one of the most conservative counties in Florida, combating police-ICE collaboration by engaging the local community in public campaigns, direct actions through mobilizations and case by case advocacy to stop deportations and detentions. Currently, she is in pursuit of her JD, and hopes to connect law with community organizing.

Jonathan Uss is the director of Constitutional Communications. He has led trainings for other attorneys as well as journalists, grantors and technologists on cyber security, privacy rights, and attorney client communications. In addition, he has provided training for civil society leaders from fifteen countries at the Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes (ENFF), in Brazil. Prior to founding Constitutional Communications, Jonathan spent a decade as a community organizer with San Francisco Women against Rape, Education Not Incarceration and the Hudson Valley Community Coalition. After graduating from CUNY Law School, he worked with formerly incarcerated people at the Fortune Society.

Rev. angel Kyodo williams Sensei, is an author, maverick spiritual teacher, master trainer and founder of Center for Transformative Change. She has been bridging the worlds of personal transformation and justice since the publication of her critically-acclaimed book, Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living With Fearlessness and Grace. Ordained as a Zen priest, she recently became the second black woman recognized as a teacher in her lineage. angel is a social visionary that sees Transformative Social Change: applying inner awareness practice to broad-based social change, as America’s next great movement. She is an early shaper and leading voice in that work and coined the name for the field. For over 15 years, she has deeply invested her time and energy to putting into practice her unwavering belief that the key to transforming society is transforming our inner lives. She has developed comprehensive systems for illuminating both practical personal change and the profoundly liberating potential of mindfulness, yoga, and somatic practices coupled with wisdom teachings. angel envisions the building of a presence-centered social justice movement as the foundation for personal freedom, a just society and the healing of divisions of race, class, faith and politic. Her work has been widely covered by such publications as New York Times, Boston Globe, Ms., Essence, Buddhadharma, Village Voice, and on the Oxygen Channel. 

Rusia N. Mohiuddin, based in NYC, is a trainer and somatic coach who pioneered the integration of somatics into an organizing framework towards developing a new, more holistic model for social justice change work that places in its center, the necessary transformation of social change agents. Rusia is currently the Principle at Universal Partnership Consulting. Over the last 18 years, she has primarily worked in non-profit, community-based organizations in New York and also co-founded the national intermediary, Social Justice Leadership. Having worked on the frontlines as an organizer for over 8 years and leading organizations as a Director, including helping to establish Families United for Racial & Economic Equality as it’s own 5013(c), Rusia brings grounded expertise to basic to advanced organizing training as well asorganizational development.