Announcing FFJ’s Latest Movement Advisor Cohort

Funders for Justice is excited to share the latest cohort of FFJ Movement Advisors. FFJ looks forward to expanding our own understanding to support organizing toward racial and gender justice, and to growing our commitment to mobilize resources toward transformative social change. As this dynamic group continues to build momentum with their leadership and organizing in racial justice, gender justice, and anti-criminalization movements, they will also work together with FFJ to continue to envision a new way forward for philanthropy.

FFJ hosted its third national funder organizing meeting in October 2019. Joining the participants were FFJ’s third cohort of advisors, including four new advisors. Advisors met with staff the day before the FFJ national meeting, to identify key needs in a new approach in funding and how FFJ can best support the field. The next day, advisors joined FFJ members and leaders in conversations throughout the day, painting a picture of challenges that lie ahead in the current political climate as well as the historical context to current struggles.

2019-2021 Cohort of FFJ Movement Advisors

FFJ Movement Advisor Cohort 2020/2021

FFJ Movement Advisors are thought leaders and partners in the work to support and sustain grassroots movements. Their visions for justice and what is needed from philanthropy provide invaluable insights to guide our efforts. In their commitment, the FFJ Field Advisors are ready to organize with philanthropy and deepen their relationship with FFJ and its members. They will continue to lead profound conversations and offer strategic guidance toward practices that lift up community safety and justice models.

We are excited for the FFJ membership to learn from their leadership and experience, and hope you will join us to strategize together on how we can best support movements organizing for social justice.

Here are the 2019-2021 FFJ Movement Advisors:

Abraham Medina My name is Abraham Medina. My gender pronouns are he/him. Currently, I serve as the convener, coordinator and process holder of the California Alliance for Youth and Community Justice (CAYCJ). Prior to that, I served as Executive Director of the National Youth Alliance on Boys and Men of Color (NYABMOC). I currently live in Stockton, California with my wife Edith, and our two children Ytztli and Elijah. I left Mexico City when I was seven years old with my mother and younger brother as a result of domestic violence. During the ordeal, I was separated from my mother and crossed the U.S. border with my younger brother, eventually reuniting with my mother in the U.S. I was undocumented until receiving DACA in 2013 and currently I am in the process of becoming a U.S. Permanent Resident. I grew up Brown and undocumented in the U.S., fighting to transform the school – to – prison – to – deportation pipeline and the justice system as we know it, through Afro – Indigenous concepts and models of justice. I have dedicated and committed most of my life to the cultivation of transformative community power for personal, community and systems transformation.


Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is a 34 year old, Affrilachian (Black Appalachian), working class woman, born and raised in Southeast Tennessee. Ash-Lee is the first black woman Executive Director of the Highlander Research & Education Center, a social justice leadership training school and cultural center founded in 1932. Through popular education, language justice, participatory research, cultural work, and intergenerational organizing, they help create spaces — at Highlander and in communities — where people gain knowledge, hope and courage, expanding their ideas of what is possible. Ash-Lee is a long-time activist working against environmental racism in central and southern Appalachia, and has fought for workers rights, racial justice, women and LGBTQUIA+ rights, reproductive justice, international human rights, and led-intergenerational social movements across the South. She serves on the governance council of the Southern Movement Assembly and is a nationally recognized leader in the Movement for Black Lives.


Celeste Faison is a strategist and trainer who cut her teeth organizing in the Blackbelt, with 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement. She’s been active ever since, working around issues of labor, electoral justice and policing. She is currently the NDWA Director of Black Organizing, where she launched “We Dream in Black,” a multi-state initiative that increases the leadership capacity of Black workers organizing for respect, recognition, and inclusion in labor protections. Piloted in New York and Georgia, the program has since expanded to seven states. Celeste oversees chapter development, leadership development, and the campaign strategy. She recently co-published a multimedia report “Pay, Professionalism and Respect” focused on Black domestic workers in the South, in partnership with IPS. Before joining NDWA Celeste was the lead organizer at Youth Together, in the Bay Area, CA, managing director of the Black Arts and Cultural Center in Selma, AL and national assistant trainer director at the League of Young Voters.

Currently, Celeste serves as a founding director of the Blackout Collective, a training organization with a mission to train 20,000 Black direct-action strategist and practitioners by 2021. She is a strategic Advisor to Me Too, where she is designing the field program, in partnership with her long-time mentor Tarana Burke. She is a Public Allies Alumni and the 2010 Tides Foundation Racial Justice Fellow. A nomadic New Yorker, she spends a majority of her free time on the road facilitating and building movement infrastructure as an active member of Movement for Black Lives. When she’s not on the road you’ll find her nestled in her NYC apartment, creating art while on conference calls.


Charlene Carruthers is a strategist, author and a leading organizer in today’s Black liberation movement. As the founding national director of BYP100 (Black Youth Project 100), she has worked alongside hundreds of young Black activists to build a national base of activist member-led organization of Black 18-35 year olds dedicated to creating justice and freedom for all Black people.

Charlene is a 2019 Roddenberry Fellow and founder of the Chicago Center for Leadership and Transformation, a locally rooted and nationally connected learning community for political education, grassroots organizing, language and strategic communications capacity building.

As a Black queer feminist with over a dozen years of experience in racial justice, feminist and youth leadership development movement work, Charlene applies her political commitments and expertise through intellectual, cultural and grassroots organizing labor across today’s movements for collective liberation. She was recognized as one of the top 10 most influential African Americans in The Root 100, one of Ebony Magazine’s “Woke 100,” an Emerging Power Player in Chicago Magazine and is the 2017 recipient of the YWCA’s Dr. Dorothy I. Height Award.

A believer in telling more complete stories about the Black Radical Tradition, Charlene provides critical analysis, political education and leadership development training for activists across the globe. Major media outlets from BBC and MSNBC to legacy Black media institutions including Ebony Magazine and Essence Magazine have highlighted her work and perspective on current events and issues impacting marginalized communities. Charlene is author of the bestselling book, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.

Chas Moore is the founder of Austin Justice Coalition, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and grassroots, activist – led organization aimed at demanding criminal justice reform and building community at the local, state, and national level. His key passions include: criminal justice reform, creating spaces for activists, leaders, and organizers of color to lead, implementing progressive and “best – practice” policies in local entities, community empowerment through community service and education, educating youth of color about a more inclusive history of their cultures, organizing and challenging community members to get civically engaged, and speaking to high – school and college students about the value and importance of their voices in creating a “better tomorrow.” Before devoting his work full-time to the creation and growth Austin Justice Coalition, Chas served as a student activist fighting many social issues at The University of Texas at Austin and the rest of the Austin Community. An advocate for the underserved, Chas champions efforts that deliberately meet community needs like back – to – school drives, fundraisers for those who have been brutalized by police, feeding the hungry and pioneering programs for black youth, men and women.

As Austin Justice Coalition Founder/Executive Director, Chas has continued to leverage his connections within city government, the police department, the DA’s office, community organizations, and a myriad of others in AJC’s extensive network to bring positive change. His work in the upcoming year will focus on the Use of Force policy, police association contract, city budget, progressive disciplinary matrix for police misconduct, and mental health response. In addition to organizing and being an agent for change, Chas enjoys good food and a good, old – fashioned book to read. A proven foodie and streetwise academic, on any given day one may find Chas patronizing the best spots to eat in Austin while reading memoirs of those who are impacting change


Fahd Ahmed came to the United States as an undocumented immigrant from Pakistan in 1991. He has been a grassroots organizer on the issues of racial profiling, immigrant justice, police accountability, national security, surveillance, workers’ rights, and educational justice over the last 18 years. Fahd has been involved with DRUM – Desis Rising Up & Moving in various capacities since 2000, when he had family members facing deportation, and entrapment as part of the War on Drugs. Within DRUM, Fahd co-led the work with Muslim, Arab, and South Asian immigrant detainees before, and immediately after 9/11, by coordinating the detainee visitation program. As the Legal and Policy Director at DRUM (2011-2014), Fahd ran the End Racial Profiling Campaign and brought together the coalitions working on Muslim surveillance, and stop and frisk, to work together to pass the landmark Community Safety Act. For the last 3 years, Fahd has been the Executive Director of DRUM.

Fahd was a recipient of the Haywood Burns Fellowship from the National Lawyers Guild, and served as an Ella Baker intern at the Center for Constitutional Rights. In addition to DRUM, Fahd worked as a legal consultant with the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana on documenting and reforming policies of juvenile detention center in Louisiana. Fahd also worked as a lecturer and researcher on Islamophobia, national security, and social movements at the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative at the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. He was also a Human Rights and National Security Reform Fellow with the Rockwood Leadership Institute, and a Fellow with the American Muslim Civil Leadership Institute.


Jenny Arwade is Co-Executive Director of Chicago-based Communities United (CU), a racial justice organization that builds community power to advance social change through a healing justice approach. Jenny has provided leadership to achieve groundbreaking reforms to expand health access for the undocumented, preserve long-term affordable rental housing and prevent displacement of families, and recently create a new Rethinking Safety Initiative in Illinois, furthering policies that address an invest/divest framework and center approaches focused on healing and transformation. Jenny is a graduate of Princeton University, a Field Advisor for Funders for Justice and the Funders Collaborative on Youth Organizing, and serves a Trustee of the health-focused Blowitz Ridgeway Foundation in Chicago.

Ken Chapman is cofounder of Poder in Action, a 501(c)3 grassroots organization that is building power to disrupt and dismantle systems of oppression and determine a liberated future as people of color in Arizona. Poder in Action is now led by young women of color who began as volunteers within the organization and created intergenerational programs based on their personal experience with injustice in the immigration, criminal justice, and education systems. Each program builds community power by centering those who are most impacted by systemic oppression.

Since 2013, Ken has also led several 501(c)4 efforts that support Poder in Action’s mission in policy advocacy and electoral strategies. In 2016, Ken managed the BAZTA Arpaio campaign that defeated former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The campaign mobilized 6 2,000 first – time voters of color through a hybrid electoral and direct – action strategy. In 2018, Ken successfully managed a 501(c)4 electoral campaign to defeat Phoenix municipal candidates who were endorsed and supported by police unions. This year, he managed the independent expenditure campaign to elect long – time immigrant justice leader Carlos Garcia to Phoenix City Council.

Before Poder In Action, Ken was the Executive Director of the Maricopa County Democratic Party which was transformed into a multi – racial campaign – focused organization. Maricopa County is home to the Phoenix – metro area and has a population larger than 17 states and the District of Columbia. Through partnerships with local labor partners, MCDP became the go – to political machine for local, state, and federal candidates. Ken got his start in electoral organizing through the 2008 Obama campaign where he worked in six states during the primaries and Ohio for the general election. Then he joined Organizing for America for the fight for healthcare reform as a promise to his mom, who passed away because she was kicked off healthcare insurance.

Ken is the only white – passing child of a biracial family that was raised in rural Arizona. Outside of progressive movement work, Ken enjoys backpacking adventures in remote locations across the mountain west. He is also rekindling his childhood love for farming and ranching through urban homesteading with the Black Phoenix Organizing Collective


Marbre Stahly-Butts, Director of Law for Black Lives works closely with organizers and communities across the country to advance and actualize radical policy. Marbre is currently a member of the National Bail Out Collective. She currently serves on the Leadership Team of the Movement For Black Lives Policy Table and helped develop the Vision for Black Lives Policy Platform. Since graduating from Yale Law School four years ago, Marbre has supported local and national organizations from across the country in their policy development and advocacy. She joined the Center for Popular Democracy as a Soros Justice Fellow in Fall 2013. Her Soros Justice work focused on organizing and working with families affected by aggressive policing and criminal justice policies in New York City in order to develop meaningful bottom up policy reforms. While in law school, Marbre focused on the intersection of criminal justice and civil rights and gained legal experience with the Bronx Defenders, the Equal Justice Initiative and the Prison Policy Initiative. Before law school Marbre received her Masters in African Studies from Oxford University and worked in Zimbabwe organizing communities impacted by violence and then in South Africa teaching at Nelson Mandela’s alma mater. Marbre graduated from Columbia University, with a BA in African-American History and Human Rights.

As a licensed acupuncturist and an experienced organizer, Mark-Anthony Johnson served as the Director of Health and Wellness at Dignity and Power Now. In this capacity, he provided strategic support for DPN’s two member-led campaigns for a legally empowered and independent civilian oversight commission of the sheriff’s department and to stop Los Angeles’ proposed $4 billion jail construction plan. He also led the Building Resilience project of DPN, a collaboration of formerly incarcerated people, organizers, health care providers and academics whose goal is to decarcerate the county jails via the diversion of incarcerated people into community-based treatment and the creation of community-based spaces to address the trauma of state violence. As a 2017 Soros Justice Fellow, Mark-Anthony founded the Frontline Wellness Network, a network of health care providers working to end the public health crisis of incarceration through action-oriented political education and bridging relationships between providers and grassroots campaigns against state violence. The Frontline Wellness Network is an Executive Committee member of JusticeLA, a broad based Los Angeles Coalition that recently stopped the county’s multi-billion jail plan while winning county wide investment in alternatives to incarceration.

Mary Hooks is a 36 year old, Black, lesbian, feminist, mother, organizer and former co-director of SONG. Southerners on New Ground is a political home for LGBTQ liberation across all lines of race, class, abilities, age, culture, gender, and sexuality in the South. They build, sustain, and connect a southern regional base of LGBTQ people in order to transform the region through strategic projects and campaigns developed in response to the current conditions in their communities. SONG builds this movement through leadership development, coalition and alliance building, intersectional analysis, and organizing. Mary joined SONG as a member in 2009 and begin organizing with SONG in 2010. Mary’s commitment to Black liberation, which is encompasses the liberation of LGBTQ liberation, is rooted in her experiences growing up under the impacts of the War on Drugs. Her people are migrants of the Great Migration, factory workers, church folks, Black women, hustlers and addicts, dykes, studs, femmes, queens and all people fighting for the liberation of oppressed people. “The mandate; to avenge the suffering of our ancestors, to earn the respect of future generations, and to be transformed in the service of the work. Let’s get free ya’ll!” – Mary Hooks


Morning Star Gali is a member of the Pit River Tribe located in Northeastern California. Ms.Gali serves as Project Director for Restoring Justice for Indigenous Peoples (RJIP) and as the California Tribal and Community Liaison for the International Indian Treaty Council, working for the Sovereignty and Self Determination of Indigenous Peoples and the recognition and protection of Indigenous Rights, Treaties, Traditional Cultures and Sacred Lands. She’s the Tribal water policy organizer for Save California Salmon and has worked as the CA Regional Network Weaver for Native Americans in Philanthropy. She is a 2019 Open Society Institute Racial Equity fellow, Funders for Justice fellow 2018-2021and a 2016-2018 Rosenberg Foundation Leading Edge Fellow, focusing on the disproportionate impact of the criminal and juvenile justice systems on Native Americans. Between 2012-2016, Ms.Gali previously worked as the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for Pit River Tribe. She continues to lead large-scale actions while helping organize Native cultural, spiritual, scholarly, and political gatherings throughout California. She is deeply committed to advocating for indigenous sovereignty issues such as missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW), climate justice, gender justice, and sacred sites protection on behalf of the tribal and inter-tribal communities in which she was raised.

Morning Star serves as a board member for California Indian Heritage Center Foundation, American Indian Cultural District of San Francisco and Women’s Health Specialists of California, along with serving on a number of advisory committees that advocate for the sovereignty and self-determination of California’s indigenous peoples and sacred landscapes.

Ola Osifo Osaze is a trans masculine queer of Edo and Yoruba descent, who was born in Port Harcourt, Rivers State and now resides in Houston, Texas. Ola is the Co-Director for the Black LGBTQ+ Migrant Project and has been a community organizer for many years, including working with Transgender Law Center, the Audre Lorde Project, Uhuru Wazobia (one of the first LGBT groups for African immigrants in the US), Queers for Economic Justice and Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Ola is a 2015 Voices of Our Nation Arts workshop (VONA) fellow, and has writings published in Apogee, Qzine, Black Girl Dangerous, Black Looks, and the anthologies Queer African Reader and Queer Africa II.


Priscilla González is Campaigns Director at Mijente, the leading digital and grassroots hub for Latinx/Chicanx organizing and movement building. Born and raised in New York City, she has been an organizer for nearly two decades. From working to pass the nation’s first Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights to helping to drive the largest unprecedented campaign/coalition for police accountability in NYC, she has experienced time and again how grassroots-led organizing always gets the goods when you’ve got a bold vision, clear and coordinated strategies, and a porous movement for everyday folks to put their “granito de arena” (do their part) to make change happen.


Zach Norris is the Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and co-founder of Restore Oakland, a community advocacy and training center that will empower Bay Area community members to transform local economic and justice systems and make a safe and secure future possible for themselves and for their families. Zach is also a co-founder of Justice for Families, a national alliance of family-driven organizations working to end our nation’s youth incarceration epidemic.

Zach helped build California’s first statewide network for families of incarcerated youth which led the effort to close five youth prisons in the state, passed legislation to enable families to stay in contact with their loved ones, and defeated Prop 6—a destructive and ineffective criminal justice ballot measure. In addition to being a Harvard graduate and NYU-educated attorney, Zach is also a graduate of the Labor Community Strategy Center’s National School for Strategic Organizing in Los Angeles, California and was a 2011 Soros Justice Fellow. He is a former board member at Witness for Peace and Just Cause Oakland and is currently serving on the Justice for Families board. Zach was a recipient of the American Constitution Society’s David Carliner Public Interest Award in 2015, and is a member of the 2016 class of the Levi Strauss Foundation’s Pioneers of Justice.

Zach is a loving husband and dedicated father of two bright daughters, whom he is raising in his hometown of Oakland, California.

Funders for Justice is a national organizing platform of grant-makers, donor networks, and funder affinity groups increasing resources to grassroots organizations at the intersection of racial justice, gender justice, community safety, and policing. Is there a conversation you’d like to have? Email us at info[at]funders4justice.og.