Rayhan Asat is an attorney and advocate. Rayhan’s practice involves Anti-Corruption & Internal Investigations, dispute resolution, human rights, and business.Rayhan is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where she was a teaching fellow and partnered with a leading Harvard Business School professor to teach a course on emerging markets. Rayhan loves exploring the intersection between law and business. She also completed two programs in Disruptive Strategy and Entrepreneurship Essentials courses at Harvard Business School Online. Rayhan serves as the Chair of Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs (HAE), and currently leads HAE’s DC chapter. As an advocate and human rights lawyer, Rayhan is committed to issues concerning surveillance, business ethics, forced labor, free media, and free speech. Rayhan advised the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in designing integrity principles for the Human-Centered Business Project.
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Zumretay Arkin, Program and Advocacy Manager at the World Uyghur Congress, an umbrella organization based in Munich, Germany, that advocates for Uyghur human rights. She recently graduated from University Laval with a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) and graduated with a Bachelors in International Relations from the University of Montreal, in 2016. She is a Uyghur-Canadian activist who continually advocates for the respect of human rights for Uyghurs. She was born in Urumqi, and immigrated to Montreal, Canada at the age of 10, with her family. She got involved in the cause, after witnessing the Urumqi Uprising in July 2009, when she was there for the summer holidays. She is a fervent believer in justice and human rights. She has been engaged in advocacy work at the UN and calling on different UN bodies to take urgent action regarding the repression of Uyghurs in East Turkistan.
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Shuting Chen, a staff attorney in the immigration unit of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Prior to joining the court in 2020, Ms. Chen represented immigrants in private practice, advocating for them before U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, immigration courts, the Board of Immigration Appeals, and the federal courts. Her work varied from removal defense to family-based immigration, appeals, and affirmative applications.
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Taylor Donahue, Safe Passage, Taylor started at Safe passage as a volunteer in 2016 and shortly after was hired part-time to work in the Prevention Program as a Prevention Specialist. She then moved over the Abuse Intervention Services and helped coordinate the program along with co-facilitate partner abuse intervention groups. Taylor recently accepted the Director of Abuse Intervention Services position. She is passionate about working at this agency because she believes strongly in working in both victim and perpetrator services to prevent and end domestic violence. Taylor feels that working with perpetrators of violence is a crucial component in stopping the cycle of violence and ultimately ending domestic violence in our community.
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Elle Dowd (she/her/hers) is a candidate for ordained ministry in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Elle has pieces of her heart in Sierra Leone, where her two children were born, and in St. Louis where she learned from the radical, queer, Black leadership during the Ferguson Uprising. She was formerly a co-conspirator with the movement to #decolonizeLutheranism and currently works as a community organizer with the Faith and Justice Collective and SOUL, writes regularly for the Disrupt Worship Project, and facilitates workshops on gender and sexuality and the Church in both secular conferences and Christian spaces. She is currently working on a book with Broadleaf to be released summer of 2021.Elle has interests in queer and feminist Biblical interpretation and liberation and body theology.
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Ashlee George is co-director of Impact Justice’s Restorative Justice Project and leads the implementation of pre-charge restorative justice diversion programs across the nation. She is a thought leader in restorative justice pedagogy and practices, and lent her expertise to pilot one of the first school-based restorative justice programs in Oakland, California, as well as one of the first survivor-oriented restorative justice diversion programs outside of California. Born and raised in Oakland, her hometown’s culture and legacy of social justice instilled in Ashlee a deep commitment to justice with an emphasis on healing. Before joining Impact Justice, she spent 13 years facilitating restorative justice dialogues between youth who caused harm and the people impacted to create spaces of transformation and healing through accountability. Ashlee holds a B.A. in ethnic studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She held an advisory council position on the National Association of Community and Restorative Justice and is currently a board member of OneLife Institute for Spirituality & Social Transformation.
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Indigo Golub currently lives and works as a legal officer in the Refugee Legal Aid Program at St. Andrew’s Refugee Services in Egypt. Hailing from New York, Indigo is an American University of Paris alumna in the History, Law & Society program who is passionate about refugee advocacy and aid. She has volunteered with organizations in the US, France, and Egypt and has approached humanitarian aid from a variety of positions- ranging from material distribution to legal assistance. Working for refugees, Indigo is continually inspired by human resilience and compassion.
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Michael Ishii is a yonsei living in NYC where he has split his time as a performing artist, organizer and clinician. Michael is the co-leader and co-founder of Tsuru for Solidarity and has been the co-chair of the New York Day of Remembrance Committee for 30 years. He is the chair of the New York Japanese American Oral History Project which received a 2018 JACS Grant, and he is a former president of the JACL, New York Chapter. He has written and performed spoken word and performance art pieces related to his family’s incarceration in the WRA camp, Minidoka, exploring themes of remembrance and healing from intergenerational trauma. He studied classical music at the Oberlin Conservatory and The Juilliard School, performing extensively as a french hornist with NYC orchestra and chamber ensembles for 20 years before moving to a career in East Asian medicine.
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Sofia Kalogirou is a legal assistant in the children's program at the Florence Project. She graduated with a double major in History, Law & Society and International and Comparative Politics from the American University of Paris. While in Paris, she interned with international organizations such as the OECD and represented her university at the Athens Democracy Forum organized by the New York Times and the UN. Her thesis discussed the unique ways that nonprofits promoted migrant rights in France, and also compared American and French nonprofits’ dialogues with governments as well. Sofia joined the Florence Project in July 2019. Growing up in an immigrant household, speaking Spanish and Greek, she has always considered herself a global citizen and hopes to foster a community of cultural sensitivity.
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Valli Kalei Kanuha, was born and raised in a rural town in Hawaiʻi in the 1950s. She is the daughter of a Native Hawaiian father and Nisei mother. Dr. Kanuha considers herself a critical, indigenous, feminist, activist-practitioner scholar with a focus on gender violence against women and children, and the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender and sexual identity. For the past 45 years, she has worked as a community-based researcher and consultant with organizations in Hawaiʻi and the continental U.S.. Her research and community interests include using indigenous, culturally-based interventions for family and domestic violence; intimate violence in women's same-sex and queer relationships; and alternative, community-based justice innovations to address interpersonal and state violence, including critiques of carceral systems, transformative and restorative justice, and abolition feminism. She is a founding member of the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo Women’s Center, Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS in New York, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. She is currently a Board member of the Joyful Heart Foundation and API Chaya, and serves as an advisor on many community and national projects.
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Adnan Khan is the Executive Director and co-founder of Re:Store Justice which he co-founded while incarcerated. Adnan was sentenced to 25 years to life under the Felony/Murder rule at the age of 18. While in prison, he inspired, launched and worked on the Felony/Murder rule legislation (Senate Bill 1437) with his organization, Re:Store Justice. The bill passed and after serving 16 years, in January 2019, Adnan was the first person re-sentenced under the bill he helped create. In addition, during his incarceration, he created FIRSTWATCH, a media filmmaking project produced entirely by incarcerated men at San Quentin State Prison that still produces short films today. His sentence was also commuted by Governor Jerry Brown in December 2018. Today, he is continues his advocacy work nationally as well as internationally. He is an Art for Justice Fellow and is on the California Reentry Enrichment Grant steering committee.
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Dr. Mimi Kim is the founder of Creative Interventions and a co-founder of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence! She has been a long-time activist, advocate and researcher challenging gender-based violence at its intersection with state violence and creating community accountability, transformative justice and other community-based alternatives to criminalization. As a second generation Korean American, she locates her political work in global solidarity with feminist anti-imperialist struggles, seeking not only the end of oppression but of the creation of liberation here and now. Mimi is also an Associate Professor of social work at California State University, Long Beach. Her recent publications include “The Carceral Creep: Gender-Based Violence, Race, and the Expansion of the Punitive State, 1973-1983” (2020) and “From Carceral Feminism to Transformative Justice: Women of Color Feminism and Alternatives to Incarceration” (2018).
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Nita May served as an Information Officer at the British Embassy of Yangon before becoming a Producer at the BBC in London. When nationwide demonstrations took place in the 1980s in Burma calling for reform under the military government, she was targeted and imprisoned for 3 years for her position in foreign service. She has recently written about her political prisoner experience and her memoir will soon be published in Myanmar (Burma).
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Daniel McCoy, Project Growth, Albany NY, the first and only organization which working with teenage offenders through classroom learning (financial literacy, self care, career and education planning), as well as working in a trade (painting, paving, bricklaying, and carpentry) in which they are paid to be able to pay back their court-ordered restitution.
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Erika Sasson, BCL, LLB, LLM, is the director of restorative practices at the Center for Court Innovation, overseeing the Center's restorative practice initiatives across a broad range of demonstration projects. She is currently directing a multi-year randomized controlled trial of restorative practices in five high schools in Brooklyn with high suspension rates. She is also overseeing a project exploring the national landscape of restorative practices in cases of intimate partner violence and sexual assault. She directs the Center's interventions in juvenile justice and gender-based violence as part of a USAID-funded project in Guatemala. She previously participated as a site coordinator for the MacArthur Safety and Justice Challenge, assisting jurisdictions in finding ways to reduce the over-reliance on jail and reduce racial and ethnic disparities in its use. Prior to joining the Center, she worked in Toronto as a federal prosecutor, where she handled drug, gun, and gang cases. She completed fellowships in human rights law in Sri Lanka, Ecuador, and Israel.
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