IMPACT

Stanley is the NYC Community Organizer for Releasing Aging People from Prison (RAPP). He was originally sentenced to 62.5 years to life in February 1987. In 2022, he was granted executive clemency through a time commutation. He was granted parole and released on April 24, 2023, after serving 37.5 years. He is attempting to re-enroll in college to obtain his Master's Degree in Social Work through the John Jay College Initiative. He is a member of Clemency Collective and the People's Campaign for Parole Justice.

Darlene Burke is the Founder and Executive Director of Ten Toes and is a Reentry and Relationships Consultant. She facilitates incarceration, reentry, and relationships workshops with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the California Parole Department, the Los Angeles County of Education, nonprofit organizations, Universities, and colleges. Darlene believes that a healthy couple parlays into a healthy family and a healthy family creates a productive and safe community.

Xóchitl Guerrero is a licensed clinical social worker and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois Chicago Jane Addams College of Social Work, where she serves as an adjunct professor in the graduate social work program. Her research interests include family separation and reunification in families that have been separated due to incarceration, immigration detention or deportation. For over 25 years, Xóchitl has served Chicago's most vulnerable communities, including survivors of intimate partner violence and sexual abuse, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals, and undocumented children from Mexico and Central America.

Xóchitl continues to advocate for individuals impacted by the criminal legal system in her current role as a mitigation specialist for individuals charged with felony crimes. Xóchitl is a passionate advocate for creating educational opportunities with and for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals through her work as a member of the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and as a faculty member with the University Without Walls education program co-facilitated by the Prison and Neighborhood Arts and Education Program and Northeastern Illinois University. Xóchitl was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, and is the proud mother of five children.   

Norris Henderson is VOTE's Founder and Executive Director and sister organization, Voters Organized to Educate. Norris is a former OSI Soros Justice Fellow. He has had tremendous success impacting public policy and discourse about reentry, police accountability, public defense for poor and indigent people, and reforming the notorious Orleans Parish Prison (OPP), also known as the Orleans Justice Center (OJC). In 2018, Norris served as the statewide campaign director for the Unanimous Jury Coalition, a ballot campaign that ended non-unanimous juries and thus Jim Crow’s last stand in Louisiana.

As someone who was wrongfully incarcerated for 27 years, Norris shares firsthand experience of racism and brutality of the criminal justice system with communities of color across Louisiana. He was a jailhouse lawyer, a co-founder of the Angola Special Civics Project, and a trailblazer for freeing other wrongfully convicted people before the inception of the Innocence Project. While incarcerated, Norris co-founded a hospice program and drafted a successful parole reform law for Lifers.

Nancy is the Chief Executive of Families Outside, a Scottish voluntary organization that works for families affected by imprisonment. Before this, she worked as an Independent Criminologist, receiving her MPhil and PhD from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, and in 2012 was appointed as Visiting Professor at the University of Strathclyde’s Centre for Law, Crime and Justice. Nancy was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s 2016 New Year’s Honors List for services to Education and Human Rights. She co-chaired the Justice & Care Workstream for the Independent Care Review and the Independent Review of the Response to Deaths in Prison in Scotland; chairs the Board of the International Coalition for Children of Incarcerated Parents (INCCIP); is a Board member of Children of Prisoners Europe (COPE; Secretary General from 2015-21); and is a member of the Global Prisoners’ Families Research Group at the Centre for Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. 

Marlon is the author of Bird Uncaged, a 21st-century abolitionist memoir with a powerful debut demanding a shift from punishment to healing, an end to mass incarceration, and a new vision of justice. He is also the host of the Decarcerated Podcast and executive director of the College & Community Fellowship, which works with justice-impacted women to provide community support, access to higher education, and eliminate systemic barriers to opportunities. His TED Talk, Am I Not Human? has amassed over 1.2 million views.

Angela Tucker is a Black woman adopted from foster care by white parents. She is the author of You Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race Identity and Transracial Adoption, the Founder of the Adoptee Mentoring Society, the subject of Closure, a documentary that chronicles her search for her biological parents, and has over 15 years of experience working within adoption and foster care agencies. Her mission to center adoptees is evident in her podcast, “The Adoptee Next Door,” the five short films she has produced, and her work consulting with media outlets like NBC’s This Is Us. Angela lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband, Bryan Tucker, an Emmy-award-winning filmmaker.