Board of Directors
 Co-Chair A native of Louisiana, Pete is a private attorney in Birmingham. He was formerly a staff attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, where he specialized in lawsuits against the Ku Klux Klan. |
 Co-Chair Director of Advocacy for the Sentencing Project in Washington, DC, Nicole is the former director of the ACLU's Prison & Jail Accountability Project (PJAP). PJAP's mission was to monitor the conditions of confinement in Texas jails and prisons. |
 Development Chair Jacob is a native of Shelby County, Tennessee, and the Executive Director of the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center in Memphis. Jacob worked with Grassroots Leadership in the campaign against privatization and expansion of the Shelby County Jail and Penal Farm. |
 Program Committee Chair June serves on the national staff of the AFL-CIO. She served for 17 years as the director of the Southern Empowerment Project and has worked on the staff of the Highlander Center. June was a founder of GIFT Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training. She has also worked for the Coal Employment Project, a national organization of women coal miners. |
 Personnel Committee Chair Leslie is Associate Professor on the Politics Department faculty at Bates College where she offers courses in African Politics, Women, Gender, and Politics, and African American Studies. She currently works as Special Assistant to the President to advance inclusion of people of color and underrepresented groups in Bates' academic program, and on its student, staff, and facultly bodies. She brought experience working in Southern communities for The Youth Project, in electoral campaigns, and anti-apartheid solidarity organizing to her work on Grassroots Leadership's Board of Directors. |
 Finance Chair Silky grew up in Houston and became active as a journalism student at the University of Texas at Austin. After college she worked with Grassroots Leadership as a student/youth organizer, educating students nationally about university connections to the private prison industry. She later spent six months in Gujarat, India volunteering with organizations focused on women's rights, communalism and displacement. Silky recently worked as an Outreach Organizer at the independent news hour, Democracy Now!, and has just joined the Detention Watch Network as their Organizing and Outreach Coordinator. She also currently co-produces Asia Pacific Forum, a progressive pan-Asian radio show on Pacifica's WBAI in New York. |
 Mitty has served on a number of boards linking social and economic justice and has worked in community economic development for the Ford Foundation, New York City government, the Center for Community Self-Help in North Carolina, the Overseas Development Network in Zimbabwe, and New York University. He was a W.K. Kellogg National Fellow, with a focus on culture and social change. |
 Megan is a graduate of the Yale Law School, now working with Attorney and Arthur Liman Public Interest Law Fellow at the Neighborhood Legal Services Association in Pittsburgh, PA. Starting in September 2011, Megan will be working as a law clerk to Judge Julio Fuentes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Megan interned at Grassroots Leadershipas a student at Sarah Lawrence College; at the age of 19, she not only researched and wrote our first “Education Versus Incarceration” report, but organized its release of and media strategy. |
 Laura Markle Downton has served as National Coordinator for Restorative Justice for the United Methodist Church, working to strengthen and mobilize networks among communities of faith engaged in the struggle to end mass incarceration, support private prison divestment campaigns, and promote restorative prevention and alternatives to incarceration. Laura completed her M.Div. studies at Princeton Theological Seminary specializing in women’s studies. Prior to theological study, she worked in the areas of employment and housing justice and legal services with grassroots organizations in Washington D.C. and Philadelphia. |
 Gislaine Williams coordinates the case management department at The Alliance for Multicultural Community Services, a non-profit organization that serves international refugees in Houston, TX. She previously served as the Statewide Advocacy Coordinator for the ACLU of Texas, leading the field organizing efforts for the organization’s criminal justice and youth rights campaigns. She has worked in refugee resettlement in Austin, TX and as a worker advocate for the Fe y Justicia Worker Center in Houston. She coordinated advocacy efforts to end immigration detention as a student organizer at Rice University and the School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin. A native of Honduras, Gislaine grew up in Houston and has participated in a number of grassroots campaigns related to immigrants’ rights, workers’ rights, environmental justice, and death penalty abolition. |
 Michael Espinoza was born and raised in Houston, Texas. He attended Milby High School, Franklin & Marshall College (B.A. in Sociology), and the University of Houston (M.A. in Sociology). Michael taught high school at the Raul Yzaguirre School for Success, where he began organizing students around the DREAM Act. He also helped coordinate Houston United, a grassroots activist coalition which has organized Houston’s immigrant’s rights mobilizations. Michael has worked SEIU Local 1- Houston Justice for Janitors Campaign and as the Texas State Director for Mi Familia Vota. Michael now serves as Houston City Director for Stand for Children, an organization that works to ensure that all children, regardless of their background, graduate from high school prepared for, and with access to, a college education. Michael currently resides in Southwest Houston with his wife, Maria, and their two children, Alex and Cathy. |