Below are the biographies for the Art of Social Change spring 2023 speakers.
Michael Gregory
Michael Gregory is Faculty Director of the Youth Advocacy and Policy Lab (Y-Lab). Mike is also Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Senior Attorney at the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative (TLPI). Mike teaches Harvard’s Education Law Clinic, in which law students represent individual families of traumatized children in the special education system and participate in TLPI’s larger systemic advocacy to create trauma-sensitive schools. Mike has also taught courses in Education Law and Policy and Education Reform Movements. Mike is a co-author of TLPI’s landmark report and policy agenda Helping Traumatized Children Learn, and is also a co-author of Educational Rights of Children Affected by Homelessness and/or Domestic Violence, a manual for child advocates. In 2009, Mike and Susan were named Bellow Scholars by the Association of American Law Schools, in recognition of TLPI’s advocacy for Safe and Supportive Schools legislation in Massachusetts. In 2013, Mike was appointed by Gov. Deval Patrick to serve on the Families and Children Requiring Assistance Advisory Board, a statewide panel that will advise the Commonwealth on the implementation of the reformed CHINS law. He received his JD from Harvard Law School in 2004, graduating cum laude. He graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in American Civilization from Brown University in 1998, and received a Master of Arts in Teaching, also from Brown University, in 1999. Mike began his work for TLPI in 2004 upon receiving a Skadden Fellowship.
Crisanne Hazen
Crisanne Hazen is the Assistant Director of Harvard Law School’s Youth Advocacy and Policy Lab (Y-Lab). Crisanne joined Harvard Law School in the summer of 2016. She came from San Jose, California, where she worked as a supervising attorney at Legal Advocates for Children and Youth (LACY), a program of the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley. Starting at LACY as an Equal Justice Works Fellow in 2006, Crisanne developed a “know your rights” curriculum for pregnant and parenting teens, which she taught at 6 area high schools. Over the 10 years at LACY, she represented hundreds of teen parents in family law and restraining order matters, as well as directly represented children and youth of all ages in a variety of civil proceedings including family law, guardianships, housing, benefits, special education, and school discipline. She helped to start and later manage a medical-legal partnership clinic in the Pediatric Department of Valley Medical Center in San Jose. She also managed other population-based projects, including a CSEC project, transition-age foster youth project, and a foster youth identity theft project. Crisanne is a graduate of Harvard University and the University of California-Davis School of Law.
Tyler Whittenberg
Tyler Whittenberg is Deputy Director of Advancement Project’s Opportunity to Learn Program. In this role, he supports grassroots campaigns led by youth of color fighting to end the criminalization of Black and Latine students and create liberatory systems of education. Prior to joining AP, Tyler was Chief Counsel for Justice System Reform at Southern Coalition for Social Justice. Tyler has dedicated his entire career to ending the school-to-prison pipeline and dismantling oppressive structures systematically imposed upon Black and Latine youth. He began his career as an 8th grade social studies teacher in Columbia, South Carolina before receiving a M.A. in Politics and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a J.D. from Tulane University Law School. Tyler also advocated for the rights of youth in the justice and foster care systems as a Staff Attorney with the Youth Law Center and helped jurisdictions throughout the U.S. reduce racial and ethnic disparities in youth-serving systems while a Site Manager with the W. Haywood Burns Institute.
Jessica Alcantara
Jessica Alcantara is a Senior Staff Attorney in the Opportunity to Learn program at Advancement Project. Jessica supports Black and Latinx communities on issues of the school-to-prison pipeline and school closures, with the goal of increasing Black and Latinx students’ access to quality, sustainable community schools, as well as winning police free schools. She also works on the intersection of education law and immigration law.
Jessica joined Advancement Project in 2016 as a Skadden Fellow. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, where she earned a B.A. in Geography and Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies, as well as a minor in Spanish Language and Literature. Following her time at Dartmouth she joined the Peace Corps, serving for two years as a Youth Development Volunteer in Azerbaijan. Jessica attended Columbia Law School, where she served as the Submissions Editor of the Columbia Journal of Race and Law. While at Columbia, Jessica also served as Admissions Chair of both the Black Law Students Association and the Latino Law Students Association, and was also involved with the Student Public Interest Network. She is an alumna of the Prep for Prep program in New York City, where she has also taught. Prior to law school, she earned a M.A. in Latin American and Latino Studies at Fordham University.
John Affeldt
John Affeldt is a managing attorney at Public Advocates in San Francisco where, since 1991, he has focused on educational equity issues through litigation, policy advocacy and power-building with grassroots organizations. At Public Advocates, John has both served as a lead counsel on major ground-breaking lawsuits –including Williams v. California, Community Coalition v. LAUSD, and Campaign for Quality Education v. California — and spear-headed a shift toward the organization’s community partnership model of movement lawyering.
Since 2000, John has worked in partnership with grassroots organizations to build the education justice infrastructure in California and inject community-based voices into state educational policymaking. These efforts have yielded significant equity reforms in state school finance, teacher quality and accountability policies. In particular, John has helped to shape several provisions of California’s school funding law known as the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), one of the nation’s most progressive finance systems. Other efforts have broken down discriminatory barriers to the teaching profession and led to the establishment of a $113 million Community Engagement Initiative to improve district community engagement practices.
John graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1990 and Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University in 1984 and has been named a California Attorney of the Year three times, by California Lawyer Magazine in 2005, by the Recorder in 2010, and by the Daily Journal in 2018 for his civil rights litigation.
Sergio Luna
Sergio Tonatiuh Luna currently serves as the State Organizer Coordinator for PICO California’s Education for Liberation campaign. Sergio is also one of the lead organizers with Inland Congregations United for Change (ICUC).
Sergio was first introduced to power of people, faith and organizing at the age of 16. As a resident of San Bernardino, one of the poorest and most dangerous cities in California according to FBI statistics, he experienced and witnessed first-hand the reality of most inner-city Black and Latino youth. Citing the lack of resources for that same youth, ICUC banded together with different congregations throughout San Bernardino to ask the local school district to invest in after-school programs. It was through this advocacy that they were able to create 8 different after-school programs, one of these was at Central City Lutheran Mission- which Sergio attended.
While Sergio participated as a youth, he witnessed city officials actively trying to shut down this congregation, especially when it opened its sanctuary as a temporary shelter for homeless men during the winter. It was through the work Sergio and others did to protect this shelter that he found his vocation for social justice.
Sergio has been involved with ICUC in San Bernardino since 2008, working in various campaigns and became full time staff in summer of 2013. These include advocating for better pathways to ensure that students are prepared to go to college, ending the disproportionate suspensions and expulsions of students of color in SBCUSD, improving parent engagement and capacity-building at schools, fighting for immigrant rights, and working with the ICUC interfaith community and allies to address the violence in the city of San Bernardino under Common Ground for Peace. At the state level, Sergio helped lead ICUC’s education for Liberation campaign for a year along with many other passionate organizers and hundreds of community members.
Sergio is honored to join the class this year to discuss how we can all be a part of the change to better our communities and our neighbors’ lives.
Marsha Levick
Marsha Levick is the co-founder and Chief Legal Officer of Juvenile Law Center, America’s first public interest law firm for children. Throughout her career, Levick has advocated for youth involved in the justice and child welfare systems, in Pennsylvania and nationwide. Levick has participated in numerous cases before the U.S. Supreme Court as well as federal and state courts nationwide. Notable cases include Roper v. Simmons, Graham v. Florida, Miller v. Alabama, and Montgomery v. Louisiana, all U.S. Supreme Court cases striking severe adult sentences for youth in the criminal justice system, and J.D.B. v North Carolina, requiring consideration of a suspect’s youth in the Miranda law enforcement/custody determination. Levick also spearheaded Juvenile’s Law Center’s work in the Luzerne County, Pa. “Kids for Cash” judges’ scandal, resulting in the vacatur of nearly 2500 juvenile adjudications and substantial financial awards to the youth and their parents. Levick serves on the Board of Directors of the Southern Poverty Law Center and Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights and is a member of the Dean’s Council of the Indiana University O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Levick has received numerous awards for her work, including the Philadelphia Award (2015) and the Philadelphia Inquirer Citizen of the Year Award (2009 – co-winner), as well as recognition for her work from the American Bar Association, American Association for Justice, the Pennsylvania Bar Association and the Philadelphia Bar Association. Levick is an adjunct professor at Temple University Beasley School of Law and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Kristin Henning
Kristin Henning is the Blume Professor of Law and Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law, where she and her law students represent youth accused of delinquency in Washington, DC. Kris was previously the Lead Attorney for the Juvenile Unit of the D.C. Public Defender Service and is currently the Director of the Mid-Atlantic Juvenile Defender Center.
Kris trains state actors across the country on the impact of racial bias and trauma in the juvenile and criminal legal systems. Her workshops help stakeholders recognize their own biases and develop strategies to counter them. Kris also worked closely with the McArthur Foundation’s Juvenile Indigent Defense Action Network to develop a 41-volume Juvenile Training Immersion Program (JTIP), a national training curriculum for youth defenders. She now co-hosts, with the Gault Center, an annual week-long summer academy for trial lawyers and a series of “Train the Trainer” programs for experienced defenders. In 2019, Kris partnered with the Gault Center to launch a Racial Justice Toolkit for youth advocates, and again in 2020, to launch the Ambassadors for Racial Justice program, a year-long program for youth defenders committed to challenging racial injustice in the juvenile legal system through litigation and systemic reform.
Kris writes extensively about race, adolescence, and policing. Her book, The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth, was published by Penguin Random House in September 2021 and was featured on the front page of the New York Times Book Review and received rave reviews in the Washington Post. The book was awarded a 2022 Media for a Just Society Award by Evident Change and the 2022 Social Justice Advocacy Award from the In the Margins Book Awards Committee. Henning serves on the ABA’s Juvenile Justice Standards Task Force and ALI’s Restatement on Children and the Law project. She has won several awards including the 2021 Juvenile Leadership Prize by the Juvenile Law Center and the 2022 Women of Distinction Award from the American Association of University Women.
Julia Olson
Julia Olson is the Executive Director and Chief Legal Counsel of Our Children’s Trust. She graduated from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, with a J.D. in 1997. For the first part of her 22-year career, Julia represented grassroots conservation groups working to protect the environment, organic agriculture, and human health. After becoming a mother, and realizing the greatest threat to her children and children everywhere was climate change, she focused her work on representing young people and elevating their voices on the issue that will most determine the quality of their lives and the well-being of all future generations. Julia founded Our Children’s Trust in 2010 to lead this strategic legal campaign on behalf of the world’s youth against governments everywhere. Julia leads Juliana v. United States, the constitutional climate change case brought by 21 youth against the U.S. government for violating their Fifth Amendment rights to life, liberty, property, and public trust resources. Julia and OCT are recipients of the Rose-Walters Prize for Global Environmental Activism. She received the Kerry Rydberg Award for Environmental Activism in 2017 and is a member of Rachel’s Network Circle of Advisors.
Sunindiya Bhalla
Sunindiya is Roca’s Executive Vice President of Women & 2Gen. She is responsible for overall program management, supervision, and coaching for Roca’s Young Mothers Programs in Eastern and Western Massachusetts, and the first out-of-state program replication in Hartford, Connecticut. Sunindiya also oversees Roca’s parenting and fatherhood work, and works on revenue generation, government affairs, and national positioning for Roca’s work related to young women and young parents. Sunindiya has over 15 years of experience in early childhood and 2Gen program development, strategy, and collective impact efforts across public and private sectors. Sunindiya graduated from Tufts University with a B.A. in Child Development and a Master’s in Public Health. She also holds an MBA in Nonprofit Management from the Heller School of Social Policy at Brandeis University.