Dr. Janaé Bonsu-Love (she/her) is the director of research and advocacy of the National Black Women’s Justice Institute (NBWJI). Dr. Bonsu-Love comes to NBWJI as an activist-scholar, policy advocate, and Licensed Master Social Worker committed to ending criminalization while supporting the healing of Black women, girls and nonbinary people. She has a decade of research and advocacy experience on issues spanning the criminal and juvenile legal systems with particular interest and expertise in the areas of policing, reentry, and gender-based violence. Dr. Bonsu-Love has extensive experience designing, implementing, analyzing, and sharing research in a variety of settings, and found a passion in providing strategic research support for grassroots campaigns concerned with gendered and racialized criminalization. She holds a Ph.D. in social work from the University of Illinois-Chicago, an M.A. in social work, policy, and administration from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in experimental psychology and criminal justice from the University of South Carolina.

Allemai Dagnatchew is a 2L at Georgetown University Law Center and a 2022 graduate of Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. She has a longstanding passion for racial and gender justice and is excited to join the Center and their work at the intersection of these issues. She is also a member of the Appellate Advocacy Division of Georgetown’s Barrister’s Council and an intern with the D.C. Attorney General’s Office of the Solicitor General.  

Khaila Mickens is a former educator with a lifelong commitment to using learning and storytelling to advance social justice. Joining the team as a research associate, she is particularly passionate about uplifting the voices and experiences of Black girls, women, and nonbinary femmes, who are often silenced while bearing the heaviest burdens in their families, workplaces, and broader society. She holds a B.S. in social analysis and research from Brown University and has experience employing quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate education policy and investigate research questions around race, gender, and sexuality.

Tenaj Moody-Perry embodies an unyielding commitment to fostering resilience, healing, and empowerment among justice-impacted survivors. Her upbringing in North Philadelphia as an Afro-Latina millennial marked by triumph over domestic violence, poverty, and parental incarceration ignited a deep understanding of the transformative strength within her own story. As the director of capacity building and learning, she leads initiatives to enhance services and programs, ensuring reentry pathways of healing and justice for women, girls and non-binary people.  

Tenaj brings over 12 years of experience across research and evaluation initiatives for higher education within correctional facilities and gender-specific programming for justice-impacted women and survivors of gender-based violence. She has developed and implemented strategies that drive positive change and break victimization ties to incarceration. She is the founder of Light To Life and a two-time best-selling author. She holds a master’s degree in criminal justice and is a licensed behavior specialist.

Through her diverse roles in nonprofit program management, Tenaj has brought her extensive knowledge in prison education, victim advocacy, and trauma-informed services. Tenaj's journey stands as a testament to her unwavering commitment to creating a safer, more equitable society for Black women and girls

Tiffany Okeani is a JD/MPH student at Georgetown University Law Center and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health committed to co-creating safe spaces with and for Black girls and women. She has worked with the California Preterm Birth Initiative and interned at Kaiser Permanente, using her skills in research, writing, communications, and design and her lived experience to advocate for marginalized communities. She has contributed to medical-legal research, created resources for Baltimore providers supporting low-income patients, and completed coursework on vulnerable youth and maternal health. At Georgetown, she is active in the Women of Color Collective, Black Law Students Association, and the Health Law Society, while also serving as a Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics staff editor and Richmond Oral Health Scholar for the Center for Community Health Innovation at the O’Neill Institute. 

Kaitlynn Powell is a lawyer with a JD from Georgetown University Law Center and a Master's in Law from the Institut d’études Politiques de Paris. Kaitlyn has extensive experience in women’s and girls’ rights and is a current Women's Law and Public Policy Fellow, where she receives hands-on legal training and mentorship in her public interest practice through Georgetown Law. As a Legal Justice Fellow at the Center on Gender Justice & Opportunity, she focused on legal research and advocacy for girls of color, particularly around adultification bias and criminalization. While a student at Georgetown Law, she was a Public Interest Fellow, Human Rights Associate, and a student attorney in Georgetown Law’s International Women’s Human Rights Clinic. She was also a member of the Women’s Legal Alliance, the Georgetown Law Socialist Student Union, the International Refugee Assistance Project, and If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice.   Kaitlynn is licensed to practice law in the District of Columbia. 

Caroline Bettinger-López is a Professor of Law, Faculty Chair of the Human Rights Program, and Director of the Human Rights Clinic at University of Miami School of Law, which she founded in 2011. From 2022-2024, she served as a Senior Advisor on Gender and Equality at the U.S. Department of Justice, Office for Victims of Crime, where she helped to lead the development of the first-ever U.S. National Plan to End Gender-Based Violence. In Fall 2021, she served as a Special Advisor to the White House Gender Policy Council. From 2015-2017, she served in the Obama-Biden Administration as the White House Advisor on Violence Against Women, Senior Advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, and member of the White House Council on Women and Girls. Over the past two decades, Professor Bettinger-López has engaged in advocacy before domestic and international law and policy forums to address gender-based violence, racial justice, and immigrants’ rights. From 2017-2021, Professor Bettinger-Lopez served as an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, in addition to her teaching responsibilities.  She has taught at University of Chicago School of Law and Columbia Law School; and was a Skadden Fellow at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project and federal law clerk. She is a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Gender-Based Violence and Maltreatment of Young People. She is the recipient of a Roddenberry Fellowship (COURAGE in Policing Project, focused on police response to domestic violence and sexual assault) and a TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund grant (Voces Unidas Project, to support low-wage immigrant women workers).

Jennifer is the CEO and co-founder of AEquitas, a nonprofit with the mission of improving the quality of justice in sexual violence—including image based sexual abuse-, intimate partner violence, stalking and human trafficking cases by developing, evaluating, and refining prosecution practices. In this position, Jennifer identifies emerging issues in the field and develops strategies to address them, presents on trial strategy, legal analysis and policy, and ethical issues at the local, state, national and international level. She collaborates with local, state, national, and international experts on innovative investigative and prosecution strategies, e.g., development tools to improve the identification of victims, perpetrators, and critical evidence and the development of performance management system to improve sexual assault prosecutions. She continues to publish articles and provides case consultation and resources to prosecutors in the U.S. and internationally. Jennifer began her career as an Assistant District Attorney in Philadelphia, where she prosecuted cases involving adult and child physical and sexual abuse as a member of her office's Family Violence and Sexual Assault Unit. Jennifer joined the National Center on the Prosecution of Violence Against Women as a Senior Attorney in 2004 and became its Director in 2007. She serves as an Editorial Board Member with the Civic Research Institute for the Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Reports and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, where she teaches Prosecuting Sexual Violence: Applying Research to Practice. She also serves on several Advisory Committees related to the prosecution of sexual violence. She graduated from Lehigh University with a Bachelor of Arts in English and East Asian Studies and the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Fels School of Government with a Juris Doctor degree and a Masters in Government Administration. She is a member of the Pennsylvania and New Jersey bars. 

Descriptions of AEquitas and its Initiatives are available at: AEquitasResource.org, theRSVP.org, JustExits.org, InnovativeProsecutionSolutions.org, and StalkingAwareness.org.

Dr. Lyle is the Executive Director of MISSSEY, a black, women-led organization that works to prevent girls and gender-expansive youth from ever entering circumstances of sexual exploitation and violence. MISSSEY also supports young people who are experiencing exploitation to exit. Once they’ve exited, MISSSEY partners with youth so that they may avoid re-entering sexually exploitative circumstances and live free of harmful transactional relationships.

For over twenty-five years, Jennifer has actively worked towards the well-being of women, girls and gender-expansive youth and their families. Her education and work have taken place in the streets, across continents, with community organizations, government, schools, and academia.

As an African American woman, an educator, and an activist, Jennifer crosses many borders to create a platform that supports women, girls and gender-expansive youth, expands their range of challenging experiences, and increases their opportunities for supportive relationships. It has always been her goal to support people to become active in their lives by providing leadership and development opportunities and by helping to reveal their rights, their capacity, and their value. Jennifer received her Master of Social Work, Master of Sociology, and Ph.D. in Social Work and Sociology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.​

Yasmin Vafa is an award-winning human rights lawyer and Executive Director of the national anti-violence organization Rights4Girls. She has successfully advocated for several laws at the federal and state levels, testified before the U.S. Senate, state legislatures, and international human rights bodies, and co-authored multiple reports detailing the over-criminalization of girls and young women of color, particularly, survivors of sexual violence. Yasmin and her work have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, ABC News, and more. She currently serves on the U.S. Advisory Committee on the Sex Trafficking of Children and Youth, is judicial faculty for the National Judicial Institute on Domestic Child Sex Trafficking, and previously served on both the Department of Justice National Girls’ Initiative Advisory Committee as well as the DOJ National Task Force on the Use of Restraints on Pregnant Women and Girls Under Correctional Custody.

Dr. Lawanda Ravoira has dedicated her life to the wellbeing of girls, young women, and youth who identify as female. She is a national expert, advocate, published author, researcher and trainer. Her vision for empowering young lives and uplifting their voices led to the 2013 founding of the Delores Barr Weaver Policy Center, which combines research, advocacy, training, and model programming. The purpose of the Policy Center is to bring a unified strategy for changing the laws, policies, and practices that have contributed to the inequitable treatment of girls, young women and youth who identify as female, especially those impacted by the justice system.  She served as the Founder and President & CEO for 7 years. In 2020, she transitioned to Founder and President Emeritus where she focused her time on national and state public policy reforms, research and teaching until her retirement in August, 2024. 

Prior to founding of the Policy Center, Dr. Ravoira founded and served as the Director of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency’s (NCCD) Center for Girls and Young Women. The NCCD Center launched the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s National Girls Institute (NGI). NGI provided a range of training, technical assistance and resources to state, tribal, community and private organizations that serve girls and young women impacted by the justice system. Dr. Ravoira led the development and implementation of this national resource. 

Dr. Ravoira is often invited to present testimony at U.S. Congressional hearing on justice-involved girls and related issues. She authored and was successful in the passage of HB 1989 which amended the State of Florida juvenile justice statutes to require gender specific services to girls in the justice system. Florida became the second state in the nation to pass such groundbreaking legislation. 

For over 13 years, Dr Ravoira served as the President & CEO of PACE Center for Girls. Under her leadership, PACE expanded from 3 programs serving 100 girls to 20 programs serving 4,500 girls annually. Prior to her tenure at PACE, she was the Director of Program Services for the National Network of Runaway and Youth Services in Washington, DC. She served as an administrator with Covenant House/Florida, Ft. Lauderdale, where she administered the residential and non-residential programming for males and females, including the adolescent pregnancy and parenting program. Previous experience includes working as a social worker with inner city youth in New York City with Catholic Guardian Society. 

She holds a Doctorate in Public Administration, Master’s in Allied Health, and a Bachelor’s in Sociology.

K. Shakira Washington, Ph.D. is Vice President of Collaborative Research and Innovative Thought (CRIT) at Justice and Joy National Collaborative. Dr. Washington has combined community organizing, advocacy, and behavioral research to address the social, economic, and political inequities faced by marginalized communities with a specific focus and interest in communities of color. Her work has included training and engaging young people and community members in participatory action research (PAR), facilitating discussions between communities most impacted by various policies and practices and decision makers, and assisting with the design and implementation of research studies focused on issues such as cancer prevention, HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, and the impact of adversity and violence during childhood on individual and community wellbeing. Her most recent work has focused on program and policy change for girls, young women and gender expansive young people who have been exposed to various forms of adversity and violence and the challenges they face as a result of these experiences, including homelessness, school disconnection and pushout, intergenerational poverty, and juvenile justice and child welfare involvement. Dr. Washington is most passionate about work that engages young people as leaders of social change that seeks to shift existing narratives that are antithetical to health and healing. Dr. Washington received her bachelor’s degree in Urban Studies from San Francisco State University, master’s degree in Public Administration from New York University, Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, and her doctorate in Behavioral and Community Health from the University of Maryland, College Park, School of Public Health.

Brianna Abreu (she/her) is a first generation immigrant from Dominican Republic, girl mom, and lifelong learner. She holds a master’s degree in Social Work with a concentration in Global and Community Practice from Monmouth University. Brianna is a strategic thinker with experience in rights and policy advocacy, research, and case management. She conducted graduate research on immigrant-centered interventions to provide support to underserved individuals in the community, Indigenous stewardship as a solution to ocean pollution, and the school-to-confinement pipeline of Black youth and communities to raise awareness to the systemic complexities of abuse. Brianna is committed to creating a world where every person has the social, economic, and political power to thrive through kinship, solidarity, and healing to mobilize human rights.

Deborah Coffy (they/she) is a Haitian American mental health and social justice advocate, researcher, and writer based in Orlando, Florida. For 5+ years, she has been involved in mental health, social justice advocacy, and communications. Because of her advocacy, she has been awarded awards such as the Dorothy Walker Ruggles Scholarship, the Legacy Award, and the Dively-Dupuis Award. While out of school, she will continue working in research and eventually apply to Ph.D. programs to become a licensed clinical neuropsychologist while working in political and mental health advocacy.

Samantha is a Puerto Rican-Nicaraguan American based in NYC. She’s not just an artist; her work delves into a spectrum of emotions and thoughts of her day-to-day life as a woman in the diaspora, growing up in the streets of New York City. Sam embraces imperfections, mistakes, and errors as sources of strength for self-growth, inspiration, and community building. Samantha utilizes the artistic growth gained in Artistic Noise’s Arts & Entrepreneurship program in the different organizations she serves. After leaving a residential treatment facility, Sam joined the Artistic Noise community in 2017. Since then, she has supported a variety of roles there, from working as a Teaching Assistant to assisting the Executive Director and Director of Art Therapy on special projects. She is the 2024 Alumni Artist-in-Residence at Artistic Noise, and  a lead team member for the pilot year of Artistic Noise’s Art & Care program, a collaboration with the School of Visual Arts MPS Art Therapy Department. 

Lee Gordon (they/them) is a disabled, queer, nonbinary, trans, Black femme Pan-African LGBTQ+ liberatory community organizer. They study Sociology and Statistics on a Data Analytics track at Harvard College. Outside of academia, Lee is National Head of Justice with Queer Youth Assemble, Community Demands Lead with Queer Unity March, a 2024 Freedom from Fear Fellow with Southerners on New Ground, and organizer with the Black Feminist Collective. In 2023, they were recognized in the Teen Vogue and GLAAD 20 under 20 List for accelerating queer acceptance and shaping the future of media & activism.

As a researcher, their interests include IPV in Black queer relationships, Critical Race Theory and criminal justice reform. They have worked with organizations such as the NAACP, TransHarvard, Human Rights Campaign, March for Our Lives, Black Feminist Future, and others to fight for decolonization and queer of color rights as a focus group facilitator, community organizer, and care practitioner. They are also a co-author of a higher educational anthology on how Black women and femmes may navigate spaces and secure communal power in academia to pursue their Ph.Ds and engage in the social justice struggle. They hope to pursue a medical degree and establish accessible healing justice programs for black queer disabled populations.

Britney Johnson (she/her) is a high school senior aspiring to be a sociologist or college professor. Areas of study which interest Britney are sociology, political science, and psychology. Born and raised in New York City, she is a proud JYSI Advisor looking to advocate for and amplify the voices of criminalized survivors of various types of abuse/torture. 

Taylor Lyons is an African American female who is currently a senior in high school wanting to join the military, the Navy specifically. Taylor wants to follow in her dad's footsteps to learn training, purpose, and service. Born in Manhattan and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Taylor loves being an advocate for sexual assault survivors. She says that everybody's voices deserve to be heard.