OUR ADVISORY BOARD
Amanda Wallace (she/her)
Amanda Wallace founded Operation Stop CPS in May of 2021, a grassroots organization that works with families and community partners to resist local child welfare agencies. Operation Stop CPS has assisted in campaigns that have seen the return of over 20 children back to their communities. Prior to launching Operation Stop CPS,Amanda had a 10-year career as a Child Abuse Investigator, and worked throughout several counties in North Carolina. Armed with this insider knowledge, Amanda co-authored the Respond in Power Guide, a guide parents and caretakers can use when engaging with the system. Amanda also co-chairs the Black Mothers March on the White House coalition which held its first mobilization in Washington D.C. in 2022. Amanda is also a member of the African National Women’s Organization.
Chris Gottlieb (she/her)
Chris Gottlieb is Director of the New York University School of Law Family Defense Clinic, an interdisciplinary clinic which represents parents accused of child abuse and neglect and strives to keep families together. Chris litigates, teaches, and writes in the field of family regulation, and partners with other family defense advocates and activists to fight for systemic change through legislative efforts and impact litigation.
Chris has represented hundreds of parents and children in New York City Family Courts. She serves on the New York City Bar Association Council on Children, the Steering Committee of the American Bar Association National Alliance for Parent Representation, and the Governing Board of United Family Advocates. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago and of New York University School of Law. She clerked for Judge Fortunato P. Benavides of the Fifth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals.
Chris is a recipient of NYU’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Faculty Award and of the New York City Bar Association Kathryn A. McDonald Award for excellence in service to the Family Court. Her article “Reflections on Judging Mothering,” 39 U. Balt. L. Rev. 371 (2010), was selected as a Notable Essay of 2010 by The Best American Essays Series. She is the author of numerous articles on family regulation law and policy.
Corey Best
Corey Best is a Black father, community organizer, activist, and leader. Originally from Washington, DC, Corey now resides in Florida. Corey has attached himself to “justice doing” -- a movement and never-ending journey of being guided by the principled struggle to advance racial justice within this nation’s family policing and human service delivery systems. Corey founded Mining For Gold in 2020. Mining For Gold is part of the larger movement that is in the active pursuit of racial justice, liberation, and freedom. The idea for Mining For Gold is directly influenced by the 405 years of racialized arrangement in our communities, and that we all have pieces of metaphorical gold flowing within us. As a practice and a discipline, Mining For Gold is held accountable to holding gathering spaces with communities and institutions and is rooted in justice-centered culture building as the most effective strategy to achieve relational and communal health. Mining For Gold embraces the universal application of co-design and community organizing to guide child and family serving systems toward a more robust, ideal, and healing way of thinking and practicing. This approach centers the knowledge, proximity, and experiences of those who are most impacted.
Erin Miles Cloud (she/her)
Erin Miles Cloud is a mom of two beautiful children, a former dancer, and a lawyer. She currently works at Civil Rights Corps and before that, was a family defense attorney and one of the co-founders of Movement for Family Power. She spends a lot of time reading astrology memes.
Fallon Justine Speaker, Esq. (she/her)
Fallon Justine Speaker, Esq. is a feminist, social justice transformer, and movement lawyer. Prior to joining LAJC, she served in academia as Director of The Jeanette Lipman Family Law Clinic at The University of Richmond School of Law and Director of the Mainzer Family Defense Clinic at Cardozo School of Law. From 2013-2019, Fallon served as a Public Defender at The Bronx Defenders where she utilized a holistic interdisciplinary defense skillset to represent community members impacted by surveillance via the family regulation and criminal legal system, and intersectional areas such as substance use, mental health, housing, and immigration. During her time at The Bronx Defenders, Fallon became very active in policy, lobbying, community organizing, reproductive justice intersectionality and movement lawyering. Since then, she has utilized policy and community organizing to play an integral role in local and national coalition building, lobbying for family regulation system reform, centering the rights of incarcerated youth and parents, and improving legal outcomes for people with disabilities. Fallon recently co-founded the Virginia Family Preservation Project and serves on the Virginia Bar Association’s Commission on the Needs of Children.
Imani Yvonne Worthy (she/her)
Imani Worthy, a proud and resilient plus-sized black mother hailing from the vibrant Bronx, New York, embraces her unique identity and heritage, despite societal and cultural norms attempting to define her throughout her life. Raised in a family of strong black women, she learned the values of community, bonding over shared passions for cooking, celebrations, and unwavering support for one another.
In 2019, Imani and her family navigated the challenging obstacle of the child welfare system, an experience that served as a catalyst for her determination to challenge societal perceptions and prejudices against black women. Fueled by the desire to dismantle harmful narratives, she co-founded Black Families Love and Unite (BLU), an organization with a mission to unite black and brown families while holding accountable the systems that perpetuate harm.
Imani, holding a Masters of Business Administration, serves as the Executive Director of BLU. Additionally, she channels her passion for advocacy as a family advocate at the Center for Family Representation (CFR), offering representation to parents in family court cases. Her expertise extends to facilitating training sessions for prominent institutions, including the National Association of Social Workers, the American Bar Association, Foster America, and the National Court of Appointed Special Advocates (CASA).
Beyond her professional accomplishments, Imani has developed impactful training programs for parents, covering essential topics such as mindfulness, embodiment, systemic oppression, toxic stress, public narrative, and public speaking. Through her multifaceted endeavors, Imani continues to be a powerful force for positive change, challenging stereotypes and fostering unity within marginalized communities.
Lisa Sangoi (she/her)
Lisa Sangoi is committed to working in service of growing a movement for foster system abolition. She has participated in or co-led a number of advocacy and organizing campaigns to roll back laws, policies and practices that punish mamas. She has also had the privilege of providing legal representation to women targeted by the child protection and criminal legal systems through trial and appellate advocacy. She spends quite a bit of time learning about drug use, pregnancy and parenting, and she regularly consults on related child welfare cases, legislation and trainings throughout the country. Her writing has been published in academic journals, print media and advocacy reports, and she presents often on these injustices. She founded and co-directed Movement for Family Power for five years. She has previously worked at Mothers Outreach Network, NYU Law Family Defense Clinic, National Advocates for Pregnant Women, Incarcerated Mothers Law Project, and Brooklyn Defender Services Family Defense Practice.
Mishi Faruqee (she/her)
Mishi Faruqee (she/her) is the Director of Andrus Family Fund (AFF), a fund of the Surdna Foundation. She oversees a $5 million grantmaking portfolio advancing AFF’s mission to support the self-determination, power, and liberation of Black, Brown, AAPI, and Indigenous youth impacted by youth incarceration, family policing, and other disruptive systems.
In close collaboration with AFF’s board, staff, and Movement Partners Advisory Council, Mishi directs funding to organizations working to abolish youth incarceration and family policing systems, instead focusing on youth-led organizing, power-building, and community-driven approaches to help youth flourish at home with their families, in school, in their communities, and in life. She joined AFF in November 2022.
As a recognized leader, advocate, and organizer in youth justice, Mishi has helped bring significant advances to youth justice and criminal justice policy throughout her career.
Most recently, Mishi served as president of Youth First Initiative, an AFF grantee partner and national campaign to end youth incarceration and invest in community-based supports, services, and opportunities for youth. In this role, she supported state-based juvenile justice campaigns and secured widespread policy changes. Previously, Mishi worked as the juvenile justice policy strategist with the ACLU, the director of the Women in Prison Project and the Juvenile Justice Project with the Correctional Association of New York, the director of youth justice programs at the Children’s Defense Fund-NY, and as a senior advisor to the Commissioner at the New York City Department of Probation. She currently serves on the board of Community Connections for Youth, a nonprofit organization in the South Bronx.
Mishi received her bachelor’s from Swarthmore College and holds graduate degrees from Oxford University and the New School for Social Research.
Mishka Terplan (he/him)
Mishka Terplan is a physician whose clinical, research, public health, and advocacy work focuses on the intersections of reproductive and behavioral health. He first learned about the family policing system from his patients by following them from clinic into court and has spent the last 15-20 years partnering with community-based organization and legal aid groups to stand for the human rights and human dignity of all parents, especially those that use drugs. Recently, his work has focused on naming and resisting the increasing carcerality of health care for birthing peoples though projects such as “Doing Right by Birth” - a self-directed learning video series designed to reduce the over-reporting of substance-exposed newborns. He is internationally recognized as an expert in the care of pregnant and parenting people who use drugs and has leveraged that position to speak and write broadly about the history and harms of the family policing system.
Tehra Coles (she/her)
Tehra Coles is the Executive Director of the Center for Family Representation (CFR). CFR is based in New York City and provides free legal representation, social work services and access to system-impacted parent advocates. CFR primarily represents parents targeted by the family policing system, including during the investigation stage. They also provide assistance with public benefits, housing, immigration and criminal matters.
Ms. Coles joined CFR in 2011 as a staff attorney in CFR’s parent defense practice. Ms. Coles developed a series of attorney and social work training on topics including representing clients in cases involving intimate partner violence, cross examination and trial skills. Ms. Coles also served as CFR’s first Supervisor of Policy and Government Affairs, working alongside impacted communities seeking to dismantle the family policing system. She also served as Co-Chair of the Practising Law Institute’s Children’s Law Institute. In 2021, Ms. Coles left CFR to join Civil Rights Corp (CRC) as Senior Policy Council. At CRC, Ms. Coles’ work focused on eliminating money bail, non-carceral community safety, legislative advocacy at all levels of government, and coalition building. Ms. Coles earned her juris doctor from Albany Law School and both a Bachelor and Masters (Social Science) from Hollins University.
OUR TRANSITION COMMITTEE
The MFP Transition Committee is a group of trusted advisors working to ensure a successful leadership transfer, maintain institutional knowledge, and build transparency and accountability.
Julia Hernandez (she/her)
Julia Hernandez is Associate Professor of Law at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law. Her legal practice, teaching and scholarship aim to contest the policing and separation of families. Julia is co-director of CUNY’s Family Defense Practicum. In the practicum’s work supporting communities and families as they push back against the family policing system, Julia and her students represent parents in family policing investigations, in judicial and administrative proceedings and in civil rights lawsuits.
Before joining CUNY’s faculty, Julia represented parents accused of child maltreatment at Brooklyn Defender Services. She was also a Staff Attorney at Catholic Migration Services. Julia is a graduate of State University of New York at New Paltz and the 2021-2022 Fulbright Research Chair in Human Rights & Social Justice at the University of Ottawa.
Keshia Adeniyi-Dorsey (she/her)
Keshia Adeniyi-Dorsey is a family defender, educator, and activist. She holds two BAs in Criminology and Psychology from the University of California, Irvine, and a JD from Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. Ms. Adeniyi-Dorsey represents parents' when CPS investigates allegations of abuse or neglect. She looks beyond the surface of a CPS petition and sues the government when CPS unlawfully separates families and/or fails to protect children in the foster system. Her work is informed by a decade of experience as a trial attorney and her own personal journey through the foster system. Ms. Adeniyi-Dorsey currently serves as an adjunct professor at Southwestern Law School, where she graduated at the top of her class. She is also a member of the Black Mother’s March steering committee, The American Bar Association’s Commission on “Youth at Risk” and Black Lives Matter's Reimagine Child Safety Coalition. When she is not seeking justice on behalf of families Keshia enjoys live music, weight lifting, DIY’ing and spending time with her husband and bright and beautiful baby girl.
Dr. Kimá Joy Taylor (she/her)
Dr. Kimá Joy Taylor is the founder of Anka Consulting, a healthcare consulting firm, and a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute. Dr. Taylor collaborates with Urban Institute researchers on a number of topics, including analyses of racial disparities in screening and treatment practices for parents with substance use disorder, management of neonatal abstinence syndrome at hospitals in California, and prevention and early detection of mental and behavioral health problems among adolescents and young adults. She most recently served as the director of the Open Society Foundations’ National Drug Addiction Treatment and Harm Reduction Program. She oversaw grantmaking that supported the expansion of access to a nonpunitive continuum of integrated, evidence-informed, and culturally effective substance use disorder services. Before joining the Open Society Foundations, Dr. Taylor served as deputy commissioner for the Baltimore City Health Department, a health and social policy legislative assistant for Senator Sarbanes, and a pediatrician at a federally qualified health center in Washington, DC. Dr. Taylor is a graduate of Brown University, Brown University School of Medicine, and the Georgetown University residency program in pediatrics. In 2002, Dr. Taylor was awarded a Commonwealth Foundation fellowship in minority health policy at Harvard University.
Marica Dinkins (she/her)
Marica Dinkins is the executive director of Black Women Rising and launched the Black Appalachian Coalition (BLAC) on June 18, 2021, as an initiative to ensure accurate and inclusive accounts are being told. In addition to her roles at Black Women Rising and BLAC, Bishop Dinkins serves as the part-time executive director for Ohioans for Sustainable Change (formerly Ohio Interfaith Power and Light). Bishop Dinkins brings a wealth of knowledge to this work, with a background in community organizing related to domestic violence, health and safety, education, climate, environment, employment and criminal justice. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary and Women and Gender Studies (University of Toledo) and a Master of Arts in Criminal Justice and Policy (Youngstown State University). Currently, Bishop Dinkins is a Ph.D. candidate at Union Institute and University focusing on Public Policy and Social Change.
Miriam Mack (she/her)
Miriam Mack is the Policy Director for The Bronx Defenders’ Family Defense Practice and is passionate about issues of racial justice and reproductive justice. She received her J.D. from Boston University School of Law, and clerked for the Honorable Solomon Oliver, Jr., in the Northern District of Ohio, and then the Honorable Justice Geraldine S. Hines of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Miriam holds a B.A. in History from Columbia University.