Lenore is the co-founder and President of Alliance for Safety and Justice, and founder of Californians for Safety and Justice. She is an attorney with extensive experience working to reform criminal justice and public safety systems. Lenore was the Campaign Chair and co-author of Proposition 47, a 2014 California ballot initiative to reduce incarceration and reallocate prison spending to mental health, drug treatment, K-12 programs and victim services. The initiative represents the first time in the nation voters have elected to reclassify multiple sections of the penal code to reduce incarceration and reallocate state money from prisons to communities. More than half a billion dollars has been reallocated from state prisons to community-based public safety programs. She also served on the Executive Committee for California’s Proposition 57 to expand prison rehabilitation and earned credit for release and Florida’s Amendment 4 to provide voting eligibility to people with old records in Florida.  Previously, Lenore served as Chief of Policy and Chief of the Alternative Programs Division at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, where she spearheaded innovative initiatives to expand alternatives to incarceration and build community partnerships. She also crafted local and state legislation to aid victims of domestic violence and protect violent crime witnesses. Lenore also previously served as Director of Public Safety for the Oakland Mayor, overseeing the Mayor’s violence reduction initiatives, and as Director of the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice where she oversaw the city’s violence prevention grants and launched city-community partnerships to improve public safety. Lenore serves on the Advisory Board of the Institute for Innovations in Prosecution of John Jay College of Criminal Justice and is a member of the California Health and Human Services Agency’s Behavioral Health Task Force. She served as the inaugural Chair of the Board of the Center for Youth Wellness, an initiative to reduce the health impacts of toxic stress on urban youth. She holds a J.D. from NYU School of Law and a B.A. from UC Berkeley, and lives with her family in Oakland, California.

Andrea Broxton is the Chief Operating Officer at the Alliance for Safety and Justice (ASJ), and is responsible for leading the organization’s state and national operations. In this capacity, she oversees the operational and financial growth plans that enable ASJ to scale up and sustain its national reach across 15 states. Broxton joined ASJ in October 2018 and brings 20 years of experience in non-profit management and program development. She has a wealth of expertise in the areas of talent management, program strategy, and organizational planning. Her proven track record in building mission-driven organizations started early in her career when she led a mentoring program for children, ages 4-18, who had a parent in the state or federal prison system. During this time, she advocated for children and families impacted by incarceration and crime and learned first-hand about the urgent need to advance new safety solutions rooted in prevention, rehabilitation, and community health. Over the years, Andrea has carried this experience with her and has transferred this knowledge into how she develops systems that govern programs and organizations. Throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, Andrea is respected for her continuous learning approach to organizational and staff development. Beneath her approach is a keen awareness of the issues and innovations that unify people and create pathways for learning and collaboration, resulting in stellar programs and advocacy efforts that deliver a lasting impact on youth, adults, and communities. Prior to joining ASJ, Andrea was the Vice President of Operations at the Partnership for Children and Youth, an advocacy and capacity-building organization championing high-quality learning opportunities for underserved youth in California, with an emphasis on after school, summer learning, and community schools. While at the Partnership, she improved the organization’s business management systems by refining organizational structures such as work and budget planning, restructuring compensation practices, and building an integrated people operation platform for staff to share knowledge, provide feedback, and design organization-wide initiatives. In addition to her extensive organizational development and operations experience, Andrea is trained in over 10 group facilitation and adult learning tools and methodologies and has coached 100’s of staff, programs, and organizations across the United States and abroad. As a capacity-builder, she has worked to leverage staff expertise and organizational culture to deepen annual and strategic planning strategies and scale business processes. Broxton holds a BA in Anthropology from Indiana University and currently lives in Oakland, CA with her husband and three children.

Anna began her career as a social worker and youth justice advocate. Her personal experience as a child sexual abuse survivor and family separation is what called her to work in policy. Anna joined CSJ after serving as the Policy Director of The Anti-Recidivism Coalition, where she helped pass three major pieces of legislation that encourage lawmakers to consider a young person’s age when they commit a crime as it relates to sentencing, parole eligibility, and more. Prior to ARC, she served in the office of State Senator Carol Liu where she developed a veteran intern program for legislative offices and worked on issues such as homelessness, juvenile justice reform, human trafficking, and women’s health.

Anna graduated from the University of Southern California with a Master’s in Social Work. She lives in Los Angeles.

Kim Deterline has over 20 years of experience working in communications and advocacy to pursue racial and economic justice and criminal justice reform. She has worked with the American Bar Association, the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, the Innocence Project and Van Jones, co-host of CNN’s Crossfire. She founded and directed a communications training and capacity-building firm called We Interrupt This Message, which helped reform juvenile and criminal justice policy across the country, free innocent young men jailed due to racial prejudice, and defeat ballot initiatives that disproportionally and negatively impact people of color. Kimberly spent five years in New Orleans, before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina. There she served as a policy advocate and communications consultant to the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, which closed two notoriously violent youth prisons and increased alternatives to incarceration. She co-produced two videos on criminal justice and communications: The Moreno-Pacheco Story: A Case Study of Principles for Dealing with Race and Media and Sudden Custody Death? The Justice for Aaron Williams Campaign. Her articles on criminal justice reform and racial justice issues have appeared in three books including Talking the Walk: A Communications Guide for Racial Justice. Prior to ASJ, she spent a year and a half as the Interim Chief of Staff for Californians for Safety and Justice. She has a BA from UC Berkeley and spent a year as a visiting scholar at Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles.

A strategist with extensive public policy and organizing experience grounded in authentic coalition building, Shakyra is Alliance for Safety and Justice’s Chief of Federal Advocacy. She previously served as the Chief of Staff, interim Ohio State Director and Managing Director of Partnerships. Shakyra joined ASJ in 2016 as the Regional Director for the Midwest region, where she provided leadership for advocacy campaigns in the Midwest, resulting in criminal justice reforms and the establishment of trauma recovery centers to help underserved crime survivors heal. Prior to joining ASJ, Shakyra worked as an educator and led policy reform campaigns. In these different capacities, Shakyra enhanced educational outcomes for students and led successful policy, legislative, and judicial rules campaigns to improve justice systems. Her efforts have led to the elimination of unfair drug law policies, enhanced protections for sexual assault victims during interviews, expanded access to counsel, supported voting rights access for currently and formerly incarcerated people, and ended routine juvenile shackling in courts. Drawing on her personal experience with sexual and community violence and her understanding of various systems, Shakyra helped shape systemic recommendations for reform efforts, including the Cleveland Division of Police’s consent decree. Shakyra is a graduate of Case Western Reserve University and lives in Cleveland, Ohio with her family.

Prior to joining the Alliance for Safety and Justice, Vickey worked for Bay Area Legal Aid as a Grants Officer, overseeing federal, local government, and foundation grants for Alameda County and Contra Costa County as well as re-entry grants and contracts in all counties of the Bay Area.  During her year at BayLegal, she secured over $5 million in funding, including $2,650,000 from new sources. She also previously worked at the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC), managing all local government, state, and foundation grants for the cities of Berkeley and Oakland on issues including housing/eviction defense, re-entry, public benefits, and immigration. While at EBCLC, she successfully transitioned the organization from an access-based case management system to a web-based database and provided trainings, best practices for data management, and statistics gathering. In addition to her extensive work with legal aid organizations, she has also contracted with start-up non-profit organizations and has helped with systems, capacity-building fundraising, and preparing organizations for funder site visits and audits. Vickey earned her bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State University with a degree in English Literature and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Andi has been working in movements for social change for over a decade, first as an organizer and for the last several years through policy research and analysis. She has collaborated on decarceration efforts and efforts to build safety outside of the criminal punishment system in Texas and California. Before coming to ASJ, Andi worked at Impact Justice, contesting policies that put youth on sex offense registries. Andi previously completed a community organizing residency doing worker organizing in New York, and she built leadership with queer and trans youth in Texas, who were transforming their schools and also challenging policing on school grounds. She holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Master’s in Public Affairs from the University of Texas. Andi currently lives in Oakland, CA.

Seung is a veteran of local government and  has extensive experience on electoral and  advocacy campaigns. In New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s inaugural term, Seung served for three years as the city’s youngest cabinet member.  As a cabinet member, he was tapped to operate and turn around the city’s beleaguered juvenile justice system, which was under federal court oversight for unconstitutional conditions.

He previously served as Chief of Staff to City Councilmember Shelley Midura, for whom he drafted policies and managed campaigns to reform the city’s troubled police department with an Independent Police Monitor, safely reduce the population in the city’s adult and juvenile jails, and create an Office of Inspector General and Ethics Review Board to watchdog against waste and corruption in city government.

Prior to his work with the city, Seung worked for the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana as Communications Director and following Hurricane Katrina, he co-founded a criminal justice reform advocacy nonprofit called Safe Streets, Strong Communities.

Seung is a proud graduate of the University of Wisconsin where he studied English and Sociology.

Subhash is an experienced strategist and community organizer with 15 years of experience advancing criminal justice reform in Florida and New York. Subhash serves as the Florida State Director for the Alliance for Safety and Justice, where he is responsible for designing and implementing statewide campaigns to advance policies that improve public safety while elevating the voices of crime survivors. Over the course of his career, he has served as an executive director, organizer and a campaign director – successfully designing and implementing community education efforts and policy campaigns.  Subhash has experience building partnerships across a wide spectrum of stakeholders including faith based organizations, non-profits, elected leaders and organizations that represent working families. Subhash brings a sophisticated understanding of civic engagement to his work with ASJ, with experience building voter power via volunteer bases in communities with historically low voter turnouts.  Subhash spent three years on Miami’s airwaves hosting his own radio show – where he brought together guests from across the political spectrum  to discuss Florida’s most pressing issues. He is originally from Saginaw, Michigan but his growing family has called Florida home for almost a decade.

Jonathon is a skilled community organizer who, prior to joining ASJ, worked as a Manager of Organizing Strategy for Leadership for Educational Equity – Louisiana, where he coached and provided strategies for teachers and former teachers to change education policies locally and statewide. He was also a Project Manager for Grassroots Solutions LLC, in Washington, DC, as well as a Regional Field Fellow with the NAACP and Deputy Youth Vote Director with the Obama campaign in Ohio. Jonathon earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Criminal Justice with a minor in Psychology from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, TX and a Masters in Public Administration from Bowie State University. Jonathon begin his organizing career during his collegiate years, where he mobilized young adults across the state of Texas around education, issue advocacy, and civic engagement. He lives in Houston, Texas.

Before working with Alliance for Safety and Justice, Kayla worked as a paralegal for an Appellate Services Company in New York City preparing records, briefs, and motions for various New York State Courts. During this time she gained considerable knowledge ensuring consultant compliance in appellate rules and regulations. She is a recent graduate from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City earning her BA in Forensic Psychology.

Caroline oversees the budget for Alliance for Safety and Justice, bringing 10 years of finance, administration, human resources and technology experience. Previously she worked at Fenton, a public interest communications firm, managing their San Francisco and Los Angeles operations while providing additional expertise to the firm’s New York and Washington, D.C., offices. This included contract negotiations, budgets and reporting requirements for many of the firms largest nonprofit and foundation clients, including The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The California Wellness Foundation and First Five LA. With an interest in creating a positive, inspiring office culture, Caroline does her best to insert some playfulness into the hard work of social change organizations.

She has a BA in Politics from Saint Mary’s College and currently lives in Oakland, hoping to one day swim in Lake Merritt.

Terry Rillera is the Executive Assistant to Lenore Anderson and Tinisch Hollins. Previously she was the executive assistant at the California League of Conservation Voters, the nonpartisan political arm of California’s environmental movement, and before that at the Public Policy Institute of California, which performs independent, objective, nonpartisan public policy research.

She’s a long-standing volunteer with both the Tibetan Aid Project and the Berkeley Public Library Bookstore. Her poetry was anthologized in the collection “Going Home to a Landscape” and has appeared in both print and online journals.

Terry received her B.A. from UC Berkeley and her M.A. from University of San Francisco.

 

Seema is an attorney and seasoned campaign strategist. As Managing Director of State Campaigns at the Alliance for Safety and Justice, Seema oversees campaigns and legislative advocacy strategies in ASJ’s partner states. Prior to joining ASJ, she worked in the nation’s capital to advance civil rights and liberties. Seema is an experienced 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 and currently resides in Washington, D.C.

Aqeela Sherrills is a spirit-centered activist, working to promote healing in marginalized communities and community ownership of public safety and is the National Training Director for Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice.

Aqeela grew up in the Jordan Downs Housing Project in Watts, Los Angeles and at 19, he began working with football star Jim Brown and co-founded the Amer-I-Can Program, Inc. to heal gang violence around the country by negotiating peace treaties in those cities. In 1992, he and his brother Daude, along with several others, forged a historic truce between the Crips and the Bloods in Watts. When the ceasefire began to fray, the Sherrills brothers created the Community Self-Determination Institute in 1999 to tackle the overwhelming personal and social issues and trauma experienced by members of the community.

On January 10, 2004, Sherrills’ 18-year-old son, Terrell, home from studying theater arts in college, was shot and killed. Determined that Terrell’s death not be in vain, Aqeela launched the Reverence Project to develop comprehensive wellness centers in urban war zones in order to introduce those who suffer from high levels of trauma to alternative healing technologies to support individuals on their healing journeys.

In addition to working with ASJ, Aqeela advises the Honorable Mayor Ras J. Baraka, Mayor of Newark, NJ on his community-based violence reduction initiative, is a fellow with the Just Beginnings Collaborative, a national network of leaders and organizations working to end child sexual abuse, and serves as a partner in LOCOL, a national fast food chain bringing healthy and responsibly-sourced food to inner cities.

Terra is a policy analyst with more than a decade of experience in the Texas legislature and criminal justice field.  Terra serves as the Texas State Director for the Alliance for Safety and Justice where she is responsible for developing and executing justice reform campaigns that center safety and that elevate the voices of crime victims. For the past ten years, Terra served as a policy analyst working for the Texas Senate Committee on Criminal Justice, alongside Committee Chair and Dean of the Senate, Senator John Whitmire.  She was responsible for drafting legislation related to criminal and juvenile justice, evaluating policy, guiding implementation, monitoring state agencies including the Texas prison system, and working with constituents on individual and community issues. Terra served on select committees and boards dealing with human trafficking, wrongful convictions, and juvenile records. Most notably, she has used her experience working across party lines to help pass legislation to decriminalize truancy and maintain treatment options for incarcerated individuals in Texas. Additionally, she was instrumental in the passage of legislation to improve mental health standards in jails and establish pre-jail diversion for arrested persons. Terra received a BA in Psychology from St Edward’s University in Austin.

Keevonya (Keevy) Wilkerson serves as our Senior Events Associate. She also provides administrative support for staff and the Vice President of Alliance for Safety of Justice. Keevy has over 20 years experience in legal administrative support beginning her work with many high profile law firms in Dallas, Texas. Propelled by her grief over the murder of her only brother John John, Keevy made the move to the non-profit sector, with hopes of amplifying the voices of victims of crime and their families. Her studies in Criminal Justice at Dallas Baptist University, led to a field research position at the Institute for Urban Policy Research at the University of Texas at Dallas. She has organized conferences dealing with drug awareness policy change, gun violence, and mothers against teen violence. Her personal story about the ineffectiveness of the “War on Drugs” was featured as an opinion editorial on Russell Simmons’ Global Grind website. Keevy is a proud mother of 3 boys, including a United States Airman, and her little sister who is an actress and activist. She is also a comedian committed to policy awareness, criminal justice reform and spreading joy.