Out Nov. 4, 2025
About the Contributors
Amanda Wallace founded Operation Stop CPS in May of 2021, a grassroots campaign that works with families and community partners to resist local child welfare agencies. Amanda co-authored the Respond in Power Guide, a guide parents and caretakers can use when engaging with the system. Amanda also co-chairs the Black Mothers March on the White House coalition which held its first mobilization in Washington D.C. in 2022.
Rev. Annie Chambers is a life-long grassroots community activist against poverty, for Universal Basic Income, housing, welfare and healthcare rights. She is a founding member and past President of the Baltimore Welfare Rights Union and Co-Chair of the National Welfare Rights Union. A Black mother/grandmother/great grandmother from inner-city Baltimore, was the past Director of Big Momma’s House which provides daytime shelter for children, feeds homeless people, works with drug-addicted parents, helps families with children find permanent shelter. She is also the former RAB program representative for Douglass Homes Public Housing in Baltimore. Today she runs a food and household goods giveaway program on Baltimore's East Side. And she still fights for the poor, working class and oppressed all over the world.
Aredvi Azad (they/them) is an educator, speaker, and trainer in sexual healing & liberation. As a queer & trans/non-binary Irani-American immigrant, Aredvi has been speaking and producing educational media about sexual trauma and healing for over a decade. Aredvi is the Co-Executive Director of The HEAL Project.
Brianna Harvey is a scholar, practitioner, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at CSU Fullerton. Her interdisciplinary research examines the ways carceral systems utilize policies, practices and other mechanisms of control to perpetuate anti-blackness and impact the lives of Black youth and their families. Dr. Harvey’s most recent publication is entitled “Ain’t Nobody About to Trap me”: The Violence of Multi-System Collusion and Entrapment for Incarcerated Disabled Girls of Color '' and was published in the Journal of School Violence. She received her Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her Master of Social Work degree from the University of Southern California.
C. Hope Tolliver is the founder and director of Black on Both Sides. The former director of organizing for one of the largest and oldest organizing groups in Chicago, Southwest Youth Collaborative, C. Hope is a mother and an artist.
Corey B. Best is a Black father, community organizer and activist. Originally from Washington, DC, Corey now resides in Florida. Corey founded Mining For Gold in 2020. The idea for Mining For Gold is directly influenced by the 405 years of racialized arrangement in our communities, and that we all have pieces of metaphorical gold flowing within us. MFG's vision is to actualize a society where we flourish without racialized oppression and carceral restrictions to reclaiming humanity. Corey has attached himself to “justice doing” -- a movement and never-ending journey of being guided by the principled struggle to abolish family policing and all carceral systems. Corey brings a deepened historical and contemporary analysis of the invention of race, racism, systems of oppression and how those systems interconnect to produce white advantage gaps. As a practice and a discipline, Corey dreams of new worlds of freedom, while practicing abolitionism through movement organizing, reflecting his membership on the advisory board of Movement for Family Power, and his membership in the Repeal CAPTA workgroup. In 2019, in partnership with leaders, communities and parents, Corey curated the Authentic Family Engagement and Strengthening approach and in 2021, co-authored the publication: Authentic Family Engagement and Strengthening Approach: A Promising Family-Centered Approach for Advancing Racial Justice with Families Involved with the Child Protection System. In 2023, Corey co-authored the introduction of NACC's 4th Edition Redbook.
Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology, and the Raymond Pace & Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania. She is also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. An internationally acclaimed scholar, activist, and social critic, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare.
E. Zimiles is a social worker grounded at the cross-section of healing, education and organizing. Her work strives to build authentic community, foster creativity and critical consciousness, and disrupt harmful relationships and systems of power.
Erica Meiners is a writer, organizer and educator in Chicago. Proud uncty of many, and a lover of bees and cats and long distance running, Erica collaboratively ran a number of initiatives - including the Prison Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. They are the co-author of Abolition. Feminism. Now. and the Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm and Ending State Violence.
Erin Miles Cloud is a civil rights attorney. She is the co-founder of Movement for Family Power, and a former family defense public defender. She is a Black- mixed race mother of two beautiful children.
Ignacio G Hutía Xeiti Rivera, M.A., is a cultural sociologist with expertise in sexual trauma, healing, and liberation for marginalized people. They are an internationally known gender non-conforming speaker, trainer, and consultant. Ignacio uses they/them/their is the Founder and Co-Executive Director at The HEAL Project.
jaboa shawntaé lake is an auntie, sister, liberation researcher, and organizer. A co-founder of the sunsetted Black Lives Matter Portland, the last 15 years of jaboa’s work has centered liberation of oppressed people and solidarity across movements through using research as a tactic within grassroots strategies, removing the collateral consequences of criminalization, youth and adult political education, craft and cultural organizing, and cultivating Black joy.
Jasmine Wali, MSW is a writer, organizer, and strategic policy consultant. She partners with national policy, movement-building, healthcare, and community organizations and institutions on initiatives to end the criminalization of parents and families—particularly parents who use drugs and survivors of gender-based violence. Jasmine has been instrumental in scaling up the capacity of grassroots organizations working towards abolishing family policing. She has also supported legislative advocacy in three states to limit the scope of mandated reporting, and co-led the writing and implementation of a "Mandated Supporting" curriculum for social work students. Jasmine has spoken about family policing and mandated reporting at a number of congressional briefings, state hearings, colleges, conferences, community events, and has written for The Nation, Boston Globe, Columbia Social Work Review, CUNY Law Review, CUNY Theory, Research, and Action in Urban Education Journal, and more.
Leah Plasse, LCSW, (she/her)is a born and raised New Yorker and school social worker with over 13 years of experience. In addition to her day job, Leah facilitates anti-oppressive workshops for clinicians and is an activist organizing since she was a teenager. She is invested in un/learning the multitude of ways social work upholds white supremacy and reinforces oppressive systems. Leah co-founded and co-facilitates the Mandated Reporters Against Mandated Reporting group. She practices from an intersectional, anti-oppressive systems perspective that centers holistic community healing. Leah is a co-author of a new Culturally Responsive Inventory for Clinicians on an Anti-Oppressive Journey.
Lisa Sangoi is committed to working in service of reproductive justice, having spent the past decade plus advocating against the separation of children and families through the child welfare and foster system. She has participated in or co-led several advocacy and organizing campaigns to roll back laws, policies and practices that punish mamas for exercising their reproductive decision making. She has also had the privilege of providing legal representation to women targeted by the child welfare and criminal legal systems through trial and appellate advocacy. She spends quite a bit of time learning about drug use, pregnancy and parenting, and she regularly consults on related child welfare cases and legislation throughout the country. Her writing has been published in academic journals, print media and advocacy reports, and she presents often on these injustices. She founded and co-directed Movement for Family Power for five years, an organization that uses movement lawyering to support grassroots organizing around foster system reform and abolition. She has previously worked at Mothers Outreach Network, NYU Law Family Defense Clinic, National Advocates for Pregnant Women, Women Prison Association Incarcerated Mothers Law Project, and Brooklyn Defender Services Family Defense Practice. She is the proud mother of two lovely children, and in a former life, she was a dancer and violinist.
Margaret Prescod is a co-founder of Black Women for Wages for Housework, coordinator of Women of Color in the Global Women’s Strike, and joint coordinator of the Care Income Now Campaign. She is on the board of the National Welfare Rights Union. She is founder of the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders and is the host of “Sojourner Truth” a nationally syndicated show on Pacifica Radio. She is a mother and the author of "Black Women Bringing it all Back Home."
Shannon Perez-Darby is a queer, mixed-race Latina, founding member of the Accountable Communities Consortium and a core member of the Mandatory Reporting is Not Neutral project. Centering queer and trans communities of color, Shannon Perez-Darby works to create the conditions to support loving, equitable relationships and communities while focusing on issues of domestic and sexual violence, accountability and abolition.
Shawn Koyano is a Black queer mother, survivor, and an advocate for families seeking community, belonging, and healing from violent systems. She strives to center and ground her work in Black feminist radical care, abolition, and dreaming of possibilities for families to be safe and whole. She is a member of Mandatory Reporting is Not Neutral (MRNN), Collective Justice, and API Chaya’s Queer Network Program and does her work on the unceded ancestral lands of the Duwamish people.
Shira Hassan (she/her) is the former executive director of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, an organizing project led by and for young people that have current or former experience in the sex trade and street economies. A lifelong harm reductionist and prison abolitionist, she is a co-founder of Justice Practice Collaborative, a capacity-building project for organizations and community members working at the intersection of transformative justice, harm reduction, and collective liberation. Shira is the co-author of Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators and the author of Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction (Haymarket 2022).
zara raven is a Black Caribbean mad queer mama, educator, and organizer. zara is a coordinator of the Philly Childcare Collective, working to support intergenerational movements, and the co-director of the Safer Movements Collective, a healing justice organization nurturing the wellness and relational skills of people invested in liberation. zara is also the former coordinator of Queenie's Crew at Project NIA, a program that engaged children in learning to build communities of care without prisons or policing. zara also organized to end the criminalization of sex workers with DecrimNow DC and Decrim NY.