Kamau Franklin

Kamau Franklin is the founder of Community Movement Builders, Inc. Kamau has been a dedicated community organizer for over thirty years, beginning in New York City and now based in Atlanta. For 18 of those years, Kamau was a leading member of a national grassroots organization dedicated to the ideas of self-determination and the teachings of Malcolm X.

He has spearheaded organizing work in various areas including youth organizing and development, police misconduct, and the development of sustainable urban communities. Kamau has coordinated and led community cop-watch programs, liberation/freedom schools for youth, electoral and policy campaigns, large-scale community gardens, organizing collectives and alternatives to incarceration programs. Kamau was an attorney for ten years in New York with his own practice in criminal, civil rights and transactional law. He now lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife and two children.

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Dana Kaplan

Dana Kaplan is the Executive Director of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana. Prior to JJPL, Dana Kaplan was a Soros Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York City. At CCR, Ms. Kaplan worked with community groups and government on developing alternatives to detention and downsizing local jails. She was also an Organizer for a partnership between CCR and two prison family organizations that reduced the cost of all phone calls from New York State prisons by fifty percent. Ms. Kaplan has been on staff at the Brooklyn-based Prison Moratorium Project, where she helped stop the construction of a youth prison upstate and two youth jail expansions in NYC. Dana holds an MA from the City University of New York and a BA from UC Berkeley, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was a recipient of the John Gardner Fellowship for Public Service.

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Laura Moye

Laura Moye is the Director of Amnesty International USA’s Death Penalty Abolition Campaign, based in Washington, DC. She has been an active voice for human rights and abolition of the death penalty since her days as a student activist. Moye has worked in various capacities for AIUSA over the past 14 years. She started working for AIUSA in the Southern Regional Office in 1998. Her focus there was on building the human rights activist base in the South. She has organized scores of conferences and trainings and provided support to AI chapters and volunteer leaders and social justice coalitions in their human rights work. As part of her anti-death penalty work, Moye has been a leader in state legislative and clemency campaigns, including a campaign for a moratorium and study of Georgia’s death penalty and to stop the execution of death row prisoner Troy Davis.

Other sessions: From Defeat to Triumph: Erasing the Death Penalty in America

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Matt Nelson

Matt Nelson is the Colombian-born, Midwestern-raised Executive Director of Presente.org—the nation’s largest online Latinx organizing group; advancing social justice with technology, media, and culture. He is a seasoned campaign strategist who has won hundreds of local and national campaigns and a skilled community organizer who has trained thousands of activists. Before his work at Presente.org, Matt was the Organizing Director at ColorOfChange.org and has co-founded several cooperative enterprises in multiple Midwestern cities. He is a long-serving community organizer who was featured in the first major book on the Ferguson Uprising, entitled, “Ferguson is America: Roots of Rebellion”. He also contributed to the book, “Welcome to the Revolution: Universalizing Resistance for Social Justice and Democracy in Perilous Times”, and is an editor of the recently released book: Turnout! Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency (Routledge Press, July 2020) EmergencyElection.org.

Other sessions: Organizing Outside the Lines: "Hard-to-Reach Communities" Winning Major Victories by Moving from Moment to Movement

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