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In 2019, Law For Black Lives offered a 6-month fellowship for legal workers and lawyers to support work towards divestment from exploitative forces including prisons, police, surveillance and fossil fuels and investment in long term community based strategies for safe, sustainable communities. Fellows received funding, training and community to turn their ideas into a reality and help build the necessary infrastructure to support transformative social change.

Over the last generation, the United States has dramatically increased spending on policing and incarceration, while drastically cutting investments to basic infrastructure and social safety net programs. The impact of these budgetary choices has largely affected Black, brown and poor neighborhoods, who have been structurally alienated from decision-making and dehumanized by narratives that paint them as dangerous and undeserving. In many low-wage Black and brown communities, the largest state investment actually comes in the form of police, prisons, and high-tech surveillance infrastructure. Meanwhile, these same neighborhoods are being starved of basic infrastructure and services, such as housing, transit, education, and healthcare and subject to the life threatening impacts of climate change and environmental disasters.

We are in a unique moment where there is widespread, bipartisan agreement that our criminal legal system requires a major overhaul. As a result, we have an opportunity to redefine what keeps us safe and what we invest in to make safety a reality. A broad array of policies and budgetary interventions are needed in our cities to reshape and redefine public safety away from criminalization and towards a real vision for secure and thriving communities.

Now more than ever, we need lawyers, working closely with their communities, to develop projects that maximize the capacity of Black communities to protect themselves, democratize the law, and build viable alternatives.

Meet the Fellows

Ahmed Mori is committed to building grassroots spaces of resistance that challenge neoliberal hegemony and all forms of racial, gender, and economic injustice. He is currently a civil rights attorney for detained non-citizens. Ahmed also advises a tenant’s union in Miami, and provides legal and strategic support to radical community organizations that seek to end the oppressive role of local government in policing neighborhoods of color and catalyze sustainable change through solidarity economies and other community wealth-building initiatives.

Ahmed Mori

Danielle Dillard is the Campaigns and Advocacy Coordinator at the Detroit Justice Center. She is a macro social worker with a background in organizing, advocacy, and program development. She began her organizing with Acción Política PCUNista - an offshoot of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, the farmworker union - where she worked as an organizer, registering and mobilizing the Latinx community to vote. She continued her journey with program development by creating pathways for mental health care professionals to engage in the asylum process, helping to win asylum cases, and then went on to create a deep canvass bilingual program to talk to community members about access to reproductive health care. She is especially interested in history and its effects on modern day communities throughout the world and hopes to bring to the surface the intersections of the current immigration system and the criminal legal system. Deeply guided by her familial history and personal experiences, she brings her ancestors with her in this work as she fights to abolish systems of oppression. Currently, she is working on bail reform, clean slate legislation, and to stop the construction of the proposed Wayne County Jail Complex in Detroit.

Danielle Dillard

Jill Cartwright is an Atlanta-based community organizer with years of experience in LGBTQ+ advocacy and anti-criminalization work. Currently, she serves as the Georgia Statewide Organizer for Southerners On New Ground, where she leads movement-building efforts throughout the state under their Free From Fear campaign. Jill began organizing at the intersection of race, class, and gender when she was eighteen years old and enrolled at Spelman College. Since then, Jill's passionate advocacy for divestment from the state and investment in communities led to an appointment by Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms to the Reimagine ACDC Taskforce to close and repurpose the Atlanta City Detention Center. Jill is committed to the work of eradicating systems and entities that threaten the self-determination of Black, LGBTQ+, and working-class communities and creating pathways to large-scale transformation.

Jill Cartwright

Maya Ragsdale collaborates with people and groups in South Florida that are organizing to abolish jails, prisons, and police and create alternatives to exploitative and harmful institutions. She currently works as a public defender, and provides legal and strategic support to radical, community-led groups in her off-time. She graduated from Harvard Law School in 2018, where she was a student organizer. She focused her legal education on understanding the nuances of the asylum, child “welfare”, and criminal legal systems. Prior to law school, Maya worked on campaigns to address police brutality and economic injustice in Los Angeles.

Maya Ragsdale

Rashad Jamal Buni (they/them, he/him) is a native Detroiter who is incredibly passionate about technology, social justice, and the intersection of both. They grew up as a super techie kid with professional goals of becoming a computer engineer. After moving back to their home city, their life trajectory made a sharp 90 degree turn; young black Detroit activists absorbed them into movement on the heels of a rally protesting the murder of a black man by an ICE agent. Rashad eventually found BYP100 as their political home, and has been deeply invested in the Movement for Black Lives ever since. They are especially interested in connecting all the dots of anti-PIC work in the city of Detroit to form a more comprehensive narrative and movement.

Rashad Buni

Tyler Whittenberg is Deputy Director of Advancement Project’s Ending the Schoolhouse-to-Jailhouse Track project. In this role, he supports grassroots youth organizations fighting to dismantle school policing and create learning environments that are nurturing, inclusive and reflective of the world they envision for themselves.

Tyler Whittenberg

Andrew Reginald Hairston is a civil rights attorney and writer based in Austin, TX. He is presently the School-to-Prison Pipeline Project Director of Texas Appleseed. He earned his law degree from Louisiana State University in May 2016, where he was a Faculty Scholar. During his time at LSU, he served as the President of the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) from 2014 to 2015, as well as the 1L Representative of the organization from 2013 to 2014. While he was the president of LSU BLSA, he served as a member of the Law Center's Diversity Task Force.

Andrew Hairston

Erin Miles Cloud, founding co-director of Movement for Family Power, is a dedicated advocate for families who are policed by the Foster System. She has represented over 400 parents in child protective proceedings, and supervised many more at the Bronx Defenders. In 2018, Erin was a lecturer at law at Columbia University School of Law, and the Co-Director of the Holistic Defense Clinic. She also serves on the NYS Dept of Health’s AIDS Institute and the NYC Department of Health’s Sexual and Reproductive Justice Community Engagement Group. Both committees examine the intersection of health systems, with race and structural inequality. Erin is also a collaborator for Black Mamas Matters Alliance.


Erin Miles Cloud

Joyce McMillan is a thought leader, advocate, activist, community organizer, and educator. Her mission is to remove systemic barriers in communities of color by bringing awareness of the racial disparities in systems where people of color are disproportionately affected. Joyce believes before change occurs the conversation about systemic oppression that creates poverty, and feeds people of color into systems must happen on all levels consistently. She completed a restorative certificate program at the New School and says change will not happen independently of healing.

Joyce McMillan

Nora is an abolitionist and an active member of the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective. Nora relocated to the Bay Area in 2013 and found a home among its supportive activist community, helping them blossom into an outspoken radical with a fierce and tender commitment to restorative justice.

Nora Smith

Tifanei Ressl-Moyer is a disability rights attorney, currently based in Sacramento, California. She believes that disability justice, a practice that examines how disability intersects with other forms of oppression, is an essential component of Black liberation. With relentless drive, she aims to disrupt power structures that oppress, abuse, and imprison Black communities, by transforming the way disability rights law is traditionally practiced. Tifanei litigates and investigates dangerous conditions of detention facilities, including jails and juvenile halls, understanding that conditions-work is just one path toward the abolition of our carceral systems. She also regularly organizes and leads trainings on the intersection of race, gender, and disability for advocates and the media. She is currently a Staff Attorney with Disability Rights California

Tifanei Ressl-Moyer

Wesley Dozier was born and grew up in Memphis, TN. He attended Vanderbilt University for undergrad and recently graduated from the law school in May. While in law school, Wesley learned about ways to use his legal education as a tool for organizing and grew passionate about abolition as a path toward freedom. Upon graduating from law school, Wesley is moving back to Memphis to work at a local organization that provides legal services to people who have been through the criminal legal system. He is very excited to learn and grow in this fellowship process and can't wait to see what the future holds.

Wesley Dozier

anneke dunbar-gronke is a queer, Black radical legal worker committed to Black and Indigenous liberation through community power-building, demanding justice, and radically sharing in love and honesty. They have worked for Planned Parenthood, the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies in New Orleans, Community Justice Project and are a proud member of Black Youth Project 100 and an alumni organizing member of the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign. Their writing and research has been primarily about bail, writing about Brangan v. Commonwealth and California’s S.B. 10, and legal remedies in support of reparations.

anneke dunbar-gronke

James Burch is St. James Infirmary’s Policy and Advocacy Director. He began his journey as an advocate at the Southern Center for Human Rights where he investigated human rights conditions in Georgia and Alabama’s prisons, jails, and court systems. James left the SCHR in 2009 to study civil rights law at Georgetown University Law Center. Upon graduating, James clerked briefly at the ACLU of Southern California before moving to the Bay Area. In the Bay, James organized with the Frisco 500 before joining the Anti Police-Terror Project as its Policy Director, advancing local and state policy initiatives in an effort to curtail police violence in communities of color. James joined St. James Infirmary in January of 2019.

James Burch

Leslie Turner is a Southern California native, but has lived in Nevada on and off since 2007 when she made her way back to the Valley to complete studies in criminal justice and sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She brings over 15 years of experience working with adults, youth, and families who have been directly impacted by systems of oppression. Leslie is passionate about ending mass incarceration and the school to prison pipeline - she is the lead organizer for the grassroots effort, the Mass Liberation project, a program with Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. In Nevada, Leslie is leading the work to the end cash bail system in Nevada, decriminalize traffic offenses, and create a justice reinvestment model for communities impacted to benefit from money saved by criminal justice reforms in Nevada. Leslie spends her time away from organizing, chasing after her energetic 3 year old son, Nasir.

Leslie Turner

Nzingha Hooker (most people call her Z) is a native of Baltimore, MD but grew up in Florence, SC. Nzingha moved back to DC in late 2016 and started working as a family law attorney at Bread for the City, where she represented DC residents with low income in primarily child support cases, but other family law matters as well. Z is also an active member of the Movement 4 Black Lives DC steering committee and Law 4 Black Lives DC where she serves as a member of the executive committee and co-chair of the policy committee which provides policy support for some amazing local organizations. Most of her work as an attorney has been in direct services. She recently transitioned into policy work with the National Employment Law Project, where she is engaged in work that will integrate NELP’s social insurance and work equity portfolios, and deepen NELP’s racial equity work. Z enjoys reading, writing, talking, a variety of outdoor activities (hiking, swimming, kayaking), music, and art.

Nzingha Hooker

Tiffany Williams Roberts is the Community Engagement & Movement Building Counsel for Southern Center for Human Rights. As a public defender, Tiffany represented hundreds of indigent clients facing felony prosecution and graduated from the Gideon’s Promise trial advocacy training program. She expanded her private practice to include civil rights litigation for victims of police abuse. Her work at Southern Center focuses on building synergy between grasstops and grassroots organizations to mobilize communities around reforms that decriminalize race and poverty.

Tiffany Williams Roberts

Zaina Alsous is an abolitionist, a daughter of the Palestinian diaspora, and a movement worker in South Florida. She's been part of organizing campaigns in the U.S. South for the last 11 years. She's currently an organizing member of the Dream Defenders, an editor, and a writer. Her poetry, reviews, and essays have been published in the Boston Review, the New Inquiry, Mask Magazine, and elsewhere. She edits for Scalawag Magazine, a publication dedicated to unsettling dominant narratives of the U.S. South.

Zaina Alsous

2020 Invest/Divest Legal Fellowship Brochure