Tell more compelling stories.

Scott is a civil rights attorney and Founder & Executive Director of Zealous, an award winning advocacy, media, and education initiative working to topple the historic imbalance of power over health and safety media, narratives, and policy. Zealous supports, organizes, and skills up public defenders, advocates, and people with direct experience to harness the power of media, technology, storytelling, and the arts to tell more compelling stories and work better together.

Zealous is an outgrowth of Scott’s work as a public defender and Director of Policy at Brooklyn Defender Services for nearly a decade, representing people charged with crimes who couldn’t afford an attorney and sharing defender perspective and expertise in a variety of media to shift the narrative and drive systemic change.

In addition to Zealous, Scott also co-founded the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund (now Envision Freedom Fund), as well as the Center for Just Journalism. He is an award-winning producer, director, and writer of advocacy films and digital experiences. Scott speaks widely, is an appointed Lecturer-in-Law at Columbia Law School and University of San Francisco School of Law in addition now to University of Chicago Law School, advises companies, organizations, and philanthropies on media projects and strategies, and his work and commentaries are regularly featured in a range of major national and local outlets.

Crystal is a movement lawyer and Managing Director at Zealous. She co-developed the first national training for public defenders moving their advocacy outside of court and continues to develop and teach this curriculum with Zealous. Crystal leads Zealous’s multidisciplinary advocacy work across the country with attorneys, advocates, artists, and people directly impacted by the criminal legal system to achieve transformative policy changes. 

Crystal previously worked as the Coordinator of Media Advocacy at Brooklyn Defender Services and Social Media Editor at The Appeal. In Oregon, she has worked on indigent defense cases and provided legal support to protestors. Crystal is on the Oregon Justice Resource Center’s Amicus Committee which provides amicus assistance on cases in Oregon that present significant social justice issues.

Demetrius is a father, husband, community organizer, public speaker, prison advocate, and artist. Demetrius' work has been featured in prison art exhibits throughout Michigan. While living in Michigan, Demetrius worked with campaign development, direct prison advocacy, collaboration efforts, and restorative practices. He worked directly with incarcerated citizens utilizing his own experience through his successful navigation of the commutation process in Michigan. In his role as Deputy Executive Director at Zealous, Demetrius will lead the administration, programs, and strategic plan of the organization. He will also direct on-the-ground projects and partnerships, leading internal development, culture, and support efforts for the Zealous team.

Annie has worked in justice reform advocacy since 2014, having served on the founding teams of JustLeadershipUSA and Alliance for Safety and Justice. She has also worked at the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), REFORM Alliance, and as an independent contractor. Throughout her career, Annie has raised tens of millions of dollars for the field; contributed to the strategic growth of several young organizations; supported legislative efforts across the country to reduce incarceration and reinvest in community services; and led campaigns and storytelling efforts that chart a new path forward for public safety. Recently, she also received her M.P.P. from American University.

As Director of Strategy at Zealous, Annie works closely with other staff to guide internal strategy, expand the organization’s fundraising efforts, manage select policy & advocacy projects, and contribute to Zealous’ narrative shifting work.

Annie lives in D.C. with her husband and her dog.

Alexz has spent her legal career serving as a public defender in New York City and Detroit. During her time as a public defender, she also played an integral role in a number of projects outside of the courtroom which include Know Your Rights training for both New York immigrant communities and also for Detroit youth, educating on Certificates of Relief from Civil Disabilities for those directly impacted, advocating for discovery reform in Albany, New York, and promoting data integrity in public defender office settings.

As Director of Defender Initiatives, Alexz serves as the point-person for public defender offices in which Zealous is working to establish internal processes, policies and training on non-traditional advocacy. She also collaborates with the organization's communications practice to amplify public defender voices, co-develops and co-teaches law school curriculum and supervises law school clinical projects.

Jacqueline “Jacq” MacLachlan is a mother, organizer, birth worker, and abolitionist. She is the co-founder of the Michigan Prison Doula Initiative and consults as a strategist with several campaigns against isolation and confinement, including the Open MI Door Campaign and the Federal Anti-Solitary Task Force. As Prison Program Director for Zealous, Jacq designs curriculums, immersive programs, and expansive arts/advocacy projects with people inside prisons. 

As Regional Director, Jacq works with local partners to envision and support impactful campaigns and projects that serve the community. After spending years as an environmental justice organizer, she is now a homesteader living reciprocally on a small piece of land in Michigan.

Olayemi Olurin is a movement lawyer, political commentator, writer, and abolitionist thinker. Olurin is Bahamian Nigerian, and was born and raised in Nassau, The Bahamas, where she lived until she moved to America in 2008. She received her JD from St. John’s University School of Law and her BA from Ohio University where she studied Political Science, African American Studies; and Law, Justice & Culture. Olurin is a public defender at The Legal Aid Society in NYC, where she represents people who cannot afford representation, who unfortunately and uncoincidentally, make up the vast majority of the people churned through the criminal system. Olurin educates people about systemic racism, abolition, and why we should divest from the prison industrial complex.  She’s a prominent voice in the movement to decarcerate and close Rikers, an infamous pre-trial detention center in NYC where 18 people have died in the last year. She’s been published in Teen Vogue, The Grio, NewsOne, and appeared on many media outlets like The Hill, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, iHeartRadio, NPR, Yahoo News, VOA News, Brut Media, BNC, The Real News Network, The Law & Crime Network, and more.  She releases essays monthly on olurinatti, where she critically analyzes different issues of our time.

As a Public Defender, Olayemi believes that advocacy must extend beyond the courtroom if we want to shift social consciousness and create real change. Olayemi takes that perspective into her role as Director of Media Advocacy where she works with advocates and movements to support their messages.

Pallavi is an multidisciplinary designer with a robust background in Architecture. A graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art with specialization in brand strategy and environmental graphic design. As a creative, she emphasizes conceptual design thinking to create experiences that promote user interaction and understanding. 

At Zealous, she is leading the design team and their efforts to use visual and experience design across national and local campaigns, events and trainings, on and offline media advocacy, and technical support initiatives across the country to tell better stories.

Asia Johnson is a writer, storyteller, and filmmaker who has worked with several organizations in the criminal justice reform space, including The Bail Project, cut50, Shakespeare in Prison, Prison Creative Arts Program, Hamtramck Free School, and the Michigan Prison Doula Initiative. Asia is a 2019 Right of Return Fellow, 2019 Room Project Fellow, 2021 Brennan Center for Justice Fellow, 2022 Art for Justice grantee, and a 2022 Highland Leader. Her Chapbook, An Exorcism, was released in 2018 and her directorial debut, Out of Place, was released in 2022.

Asia studied at University of Michigan-Dearborn and is the Manager of Storytelling and Media Productions at Zealous. When Asia isn’t helping to uplift the stories of those impacted by the criminal legal system and making her dream of a world without cages come true, she is writing poetry.

CJ is the CEO of Black with No Chaser and has more than 15 years’ experience in law, content creation and social media outreach.

The Movement Attorney sits at the helm of Black With No Chaser, a digital publication that has amassed an audience of more than 25 million people across all platforms.

He directs content that addresses systemic oppression, socioeconomic issues, and offers the unapologetic amplification of Black voices.

CJ is the creator of the viral hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, which Time Magazine named “Most Influential.” The hashtag has been taught in elementary schools and universities around the world. CJ, who also is a specialist in influencer marketing, consulting campaigns and advisory, has been a pundit for CNN, BBC, CBC, NBC, and has appeared on other television networks.

The Hattiesburg, Mississippi native is a graduate of the HBCU Tougaloo College and the Thurgood Marshall School of Law. He is the 2015 recipient of the institution’s first “Rising Eagle” Award.

Tanya Lozano is a self-proclaimed struggle kid, organizer, community architect, Chicago Magazine’s Chicagoan of the year 2020, Redcross hero for social justice impact 2021, cook county awardee of the excellence in youth community outreach 2021, and above all mother of 2 bi-racial children. Lozano wakes up every day ready to serve. Niece of Slain latino activist, Rudy Lozano, daughter of Immigration Activist Emma Lozano and Chicago activist Reverend Slim Coleman.

Tanya is the lead Chicago Organizer for Zealous, founder and CEO of Healthy Hood Chicago, member of the We Got Us coalition, the west side United community advisory council, the Southwest environmental Justice alliance and the pilsen faith table initiative.

Christopher Edwards is a seasoned professional with over 14 years of experience in sales, marketing, and entrepreneurship. He's passionate about community involvement and has dedicated time to local upliftment projects.

With a strong background in team leadership and strategic marketing, Chris is committed to making a positive impact. He's focused on leveraging renewable energy to create sustainable solutions for underserved communities.

Kelsey is a creative with a passion to empower, provoke thought, and drive change. With experience in branding, web design, product design, medical design, and advertising she is well-versed in design processes. She believes good design only happens when the audience feels connected through empathy, ethos, and storytelling.

At Zealous, she is a senior designer and works on visual and experience design for campaigns, events, and trainings, as well as, digital and print work.

Aaron has previously worked in data analytics and visualization, but found passion in audio and visual creative work. Combining that technical skill with his want to make political and activist messages more accessable, he partnered with Olayemi Olurin and the team at Zealous to help execute those visions.

Aaron believes strongly in political education and its accessibility, which led him to seek out creators with the same mindset. His role as Creative Communications Associate helps spread the visibility and messages of activists and organizers to everyday people.

Andrew graduated from Yale College with a BA in American Studies. Outside of Zealous, they organize with the devi co-op to free criminalized survivors of domestic violence from prison in Georgia. Previously, Andrew organized with Mourning Our Losses, a group that formed during the COVID-19 pandemic to advocate for emergency releases from prison and to memorialize people who died in jails, prisons, and detention centers. At Yale, they also worked as a Communication & Consent Educator to end sexual violence on campus

Andrew is at the intellectual and organizational heart of Zealous, supporting policy, communications, relationship-building, curricular, and operational aspects of the work. He works closely with all team members to establish and maintain local partnerships and coalitions, design and implement campaigns and initiatives, and make complex policy and legal issues accessible.

Sunnie is an organizer, narrative strategist, and artist dedicated to collective liberation. Previously, Sunnie built narrative power towards racial justice with Asian American Futures and served as a research manager at UC Law SF's Center for Innovation. Sunnie also co-founded Xīn Shēng | 心声 Project, which co-chairs the Asian American Disinformation Table. Sunnie is a 2023 Bandung Artist-in-Residence for Black-Asian solidarity, 2023 Analyst Institute Expy Award recipient, 2022 Justice is Global Fellow, and 2021 Yale Law School Arthur Liman Fellow in Public Interest Law. Sunnie is a graduate of Yale University with degrees in Studio Art and History.

Sunnie is at the intellectual and organizational heart of Zealous, supporting policy, communications, relationship-building, curricular, and operational aspects of the work. She works closely with all team members to establish and maintain local partnerships and coalitions, design and implement campaigns and initiatives, and make complex policy and legal issues accessible.

Alex Bunin is the Chief Public Defender for Harris County, Texas, an office he established in 2010. Previously, he was the Federal Public Defender for the Northern District of New York. In 1999, he was appointed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to establish Federal Public Defender offices in the Districts of Northern New York and Vermont and he was twice reappointed to additional four-year terms. He sits on the Advisory Board of THE CHAMPION magazine and the CRIMINAL JUSTICE MAGAZINE of the American Bar Association. He served on the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Board of Directors (2012-15), Executive Committee (2013-14), and committees on Federal Rules, Forensic Sciences, and Fourth Amendment Advocacy. He is Vice-Chair of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association’s Public Defender Committee and a Senior Fellow of the American Leadership Forum. As well as having written law review articles on federal sentencing and the death penalty, he is co-author of O’CONNOR’S FEDERAL CRIMINAL RULES & CODES (Jones McClure 2016).

Brendon Woods is the first African American Public Defender in Alameda County history. Woods leads 160 attorneys, investigators, and support staff, operating out of five branches throughout the County, to provide superior legal defense in more than 3,300 new files monthly. In 2013, his office was named Law Office of the Year by the Alameda County Bar Association. Brendon is a nationally recognized leader and innovator in public defense. He was recently sworn in as the President of the California Public Defenders Association and was honored with the Harvard Law School Wasserstein Public Interest Fellowship for his outstanding public service accomplishments. He shares his expertise at speaking engagements around the country and is considered an expert on many subjects associated with public defense, including holistic representation, racial profiling, community empowerment, police reform, and models of immigration representation.

James Forman Jr. is J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He attended public schools in Detroit and New York City before graduating from the Atlanta Public Schools. After attending Brown University and Yale Law School, he worked as a law clerk for Judge William Norris of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court. After clerking, he joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where for six years he represented both juveniles and adults charged with crimes.

During his time as a public defender, Professor Forman became frustrated with the lack of education and job training opportunities for his clients. So in 1997, along with David Domenici, he started the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, an alternative school for school dropouts and youth who had previously been arrested. A decade later, in 2007, Maya Angelou School expanded and agreed to run the school inside D.C.’s juvenile prison. That school, which had long been an abysmal failure, has been transformed under the leadership of the Maya Angelou staff; the court monitor overseeing D.C.’s juvenile system called the turnaround “extraordinary.”

Forman taught at Georgetown Law from 2003 to 2011, when he joined the Yale faculty. At Yale, he teaches Criminal Law and a seminar called Inside Out: Issues in Criminal Justice, in which Yale law students study alongside men and women incarcerated in state and federal prisons.

Professor Forman teaches and writes in the areas of criminal procedure and criminal law policy, constitutional law, juvenile justice, and education law and policy. His particular interests are schools, prisons, and police, and those institutions’ race and class dimensions. Professor Forman’s first book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, was on many top 10 lists, including the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2017, and was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Jonathan Rapping is a nationally renowned criminal justice innovator and 2014 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellow, who moved from Washington, D.C. to Atlanta, because he found the injustice within our criminal justice system – particularly in the South – to be unacceptable. In 2007, Rapping founded Gideon’s Promise and began an initiative to change the public defense landscape across America by grooming a generation of public defenders – many of whom are often so overwhelmed by crushing caseloads that they are unable to provide their clients the representation the Constitution demands – to rise up and fight against the injustice within our justice system. In his quest to train and equip public defenders with the resources necessary to ensure all citizens receive their Constitutional right of “equal justice for all,” Rapping and his organization have become symbols of a new civil rights movement.

Josie Duffy Rice is a journalist and lawyer whose work is primarily focused on prosecutors, prisons, and other criminal justice issues. Currently, she is President of The Appeal, a news publication that publishes original journalism about the criminal justice system. Josie co-hosts the podcast Justice in America with Clint Smith. She is a 2019 Type Media Fellow, and a Civic Media Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Appeal, Slate, Gawker, Ebony, and Spook Mag, among others.

Khalil A. Cumberbatch currently serves Chief Strategist at New Yorkers United for Justice. He previously served as Associate Vice President of Policy at the Fortune Society, a reentry organization whose goal is to build people and not prisons; as well as Manager of Trainings at JustLeadershipUSA, a national non-profit dedicated to cutting the US correctional population in half by year 2030. He is also a lecturer at Columbia University School of Social Work. In December 2014, after being held for five months in immigration detention, Khalil was one of two recipients to receive an Executive Pardon from NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo to prevent his deportation from the United States.

Lara Bazelon is a writer and associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where she is the director of the Criminal Juvenile Justice and Racial Justice Clinics. A 2016 MacDowell Fellow and a 2017 Mesa Refuge Langeloth Fellow, she is the former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent. Bazelon is also a nonresident fellow with Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, Washington Post, Politico, and Slate, where she is a contributing writer and has a long-running series about wrongful conviction cases.

Meenakshi "Meena" Ashley Harris is an American lawyer, tech-policy expert, political activist, and entrepreneur. On International Women's Day, March 8, 2017, she launched the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign, a grassroots fundraising initiative that benefits women's organizations like Planned Parenthood and EMILY's List.

Rabia Chaudry is an attorney and a partner at the Chaudry and Anwer Immigration Law Firm based in Northern Virginia, where she supervises asylum cases and immigration appeals. She is well known as the co-host and co-producer of the hit criminal justice podcast Undisclosed and the political podcast The 45th, with nearly 300 million downloads combined. She is also the author of the NY Times Bestselling book, "Adnan's Story,” and Executive Producer of the Emmy-nominated HBO docuseries "The Case Against Adnan Syed".

Raj Jayadev is a community organizer creating a model of grassroots collective action that gives individuals facing incarceration, their families, and their communities an active role in their defense. Jayadev’s work in criminal justice reform has grown out of his social activism work with Silicon Valley De-Bug (De-Bug), an organization he co-founded in 2001. De-Bug began as a magazine about issues affecting low-wage manufacturing, temporary workers, and it has since evolved into a multidimensional platform for community organizing, social justice advocacy, and multimedia storytelling by low-income, minority, incarcerated, and other disenfranchised communities.

Samuel Sinyangwe, 27, is a policy analyst and data scientist who works with communities of color to fight systemic racism through cutting-edge policies and strategies. Samuel co-founded Mapping Police Violence to support activists across the country to collect and use data to fight police violence and co-founded Campaign Zero to advocate for local, state, and federal policy solutions to end police violence. Samuel has been featured on MSNBC, CNN, BBC, LA Times, the Forbes 30 under 30 and The Root 100. Previously, Samuel worked at PolicyLink to support a national network of 61 Promise Neighborhoods communities to build cradle-to-career systems of support for low-income families.

Soledad O’Brien is an award-winning journalist, speaker, author and philanthropist who anchors and produces the Hearst Television political magazine program “Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien.” O’Brien, founder and CEO of Starfish Media Group, also reports for HBO Real Sports, the PBS NewsHour, WebMD and has authored two books. She has appeared on networks, Fox and Oxygen and anchored and reported for NBC, MSNBC and CNN. She has won numerous awards, including three Emmys, the George Peabody award, an Alfred I DuPont prize and the Gracie. Newsweek Magazine named her one of the “15 People Who Make America Great.” With her husband, she is founder of the PowHERful Foundation that helps young women get to and through college.