Kamau Franklin

Kamau has worked as a community activist for over fifteen years in New York City and is now based in the south. In addition to his work as an activist attorney, he is a leading member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. An organization dedicated to human rights advocacy and building grassroots institutions in the black community. The organization works on various issues including youth development, fighting police misconduct, and creating sustainable urban communities. Kamau has helped develop community cop-watch programs, freedom school programs for youth and alternatives to incarceration programs.

Kamau has also written articles for various on-line publications, including Black Agenda, Left Turn, ThyBlackman.com and Organizing. He is a featured writer in the upcoming book A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X. He writes regularly at his blog at kamaufranklin.wordpress.com. Kamau is married to Edget Betru.

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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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