Our Team

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

jasmine Sankofa joined Movement for Family Power in October 2023 as the Executive Director. jasmine is a passionate movement lawyer, scholar, activist, storyteller, birth worker, and bonus/god mama committed to abolition and grounded in the belief that when we fight, we win.

As a Black woman hailing from Long Beach, California, jasmine has seen firsthand the ways in which systems converge to surveil, punish, and control BIPOC and low-income communities. Her work has focused on sex work decriminalization, decarceration, survivor justice, and exposing the inhumane practice of forced family separations, centering the voices and lived experiences of all Black women and girls.

Prior to joining MFP, jasmine managed decarceration campaigns in Oklahoma and led the mass incarceration storytelling work at FWD.us. While there, she drafted several bills and wrote an issue brief highlighting the punishment of survivors and mothers living in poverty through Oklahoma’s vague and overly broad child abuse and neglect statute. jasmine also previously worked at Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, where she researched and wrote a 121-page report documenting the experiences of mothers separated from their children and at risk of having their parental rights terminated while detained pretrial.

jasmine graduated from UCLA School of Law with specializations in Critical Race Studies and Public Interest Law and Policy, and UC San Diego with degrees in Sociology and Critical Gender Studies and a minor in African-American Studies.

Note: jasmine's first name is intentionally not capitalized to uplift her chosen last name "Sankofa," which is a West African Adinkra symbol and principle about the power of learning from the past in order to make progress in the future.