March

Ms. Mayes currently serves as Executive Director of Southern Echo Inc. based in Jackson Mississippi. She previously served as CFO for 11 years and has more than 25 years of public, private, and governmental experience in accounting, management, and organizational development. During her tenure as ED of Southern Echo, she has served on numerous steering committees, which has allowed her to highlight the needs of Mississippians and the Southern Region, as well as create opportunities for smaller nonprofits to receive technical support and funding. She has been instrumental in bringing community leaders together to address issues involving education, juvenile and criminal justice, land zoning, civic engagement, human services, school and school bond issues, organizational development, health equity, economic development, environmental justice/climate change, and fiscal accountability.

Brother Tommy Joshua Caison (he/him) is a North Philadelphia-born, faith-based community organizer and entrepreneur with deep roots in the U.S. South. His work focuses on land reclamation, local democracy, and the building of new Black communities. He is the founder and Executive Director of the Philly Peace Park and CEO of Green Wall St. LLC, an innovation firm.

Nina Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Program in Black Studies at Swarthmore College. Consistent with her training in Urban Studies, African-American Studies, and Culture and Communication, her research interests lie in the areas of inequality, politics, race, space, class, culture, stratification and mobility. She has recently published papers on political issues relative to black experiences of upward mobility and ruminations on a sociology of Black Liberation and contributed to a documentary (Turning A Corner, Beyondmedia Productions) on the legal, economic, and social barriers to exiting street level sex work. She has presented work on the representations of race, class and place in mid century black novels, including the work of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston and a community video project on the impact of Islam on black religious, social and political life in Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley. Her book project revisits the classic works of W.E.B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier and considers meaning making processes among the black elite, its relationship to the larger black population, and its role in any projects of collective racial advancement. Her current research is a multi-method study of the impacts of mass incarceration at the neighborhood level, which is complemented by her teaching in State Correctional Institutions in Pennsylvania. She is a member of both the Graterford and Chester Think Tanks, two communities of scholars who work on issues related to the criminal legal system and provide opportunities for engagement across the physical and social barriers that prisons create.