Contributors

As CEO of the St. Louis Integrated Health Network (IHN), Ms. Johnson-Javois, MSW ‘02, leads a $1.5 million nonprofit that serves the region’s safety net health care providers and the local community to promote the mission of providing quality, affordable, accessible care to all with an emphasis on serving the underserved. Her leadership in the healthcare sector has garnered notable recognition including being selected by Mental Health America of Eastern Missouri as a 2016 Silver Bell Award recipient for her outstanding community service, leadership, vision and values, and being selected as St. Louis Children’s Hospital 2015 Community Advocate of the Year. She was also selected by the St. Louis Business Journal 2015 Class Diverse Business Leaders and received the Access to Equal Justice Award from the Washington University School of Law’s Clinical Education Program.

Javad spent nine years with the Department of Justice and then the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, National Security Law Division. While with the federal government, Javad used his expertise in immigration law to prosecute terrorists, terrorist financiers and aliens engaged in espionage and other criminal acts.

In April 2014, Javad returned to St. Louis after living in D.C. and Chicago to open a small law firm focusing on immigration and the burgeoning start-up community. Four months later, Michael Brown was killed – changing the trajectory of St. Louis and Javad’s legal career. Javad, and his law partner Jim Wyrsch, started by helping protestors clear their municipal warrants so that the warrants could not be used to keep protestors in jail for days and weeks at a time. Most of the warrants were for minor, poverty-based violations.

Over the past five years, Javad’s practice has shifted toward civil rights work. His firm currently has over 20 lawsuits pending against the St. Louis Municipal Police Department (SLMPD) for excessive force. Their firm has sued Ferguson on at least three occasions. Currently, the firm represents an African American SLMPD officer who was shot while he was off-duty by a white SLMPD officer.

Javad lives in the Shaw neighborhood of St. Louis with his wife Mollie and their two daughters.

We Stories is a St. Louis-based nonprofit organization that engages White families to change the conversation about and build momentum towards racial justice and health equity. In 4 short years they have directly engaged 900 families, helping them to start and strengthen conversations about race and racism and increase their capacity for civic engagement and advocacy. Their work has touched thousands more through innovative partnerships with schools, educator networks, libraries and other family serving organizations.

She has spent most of her professional life as a social entrepreneur, community builder, innovator and advocate. She was co-founder of In Good Company Workplaces, a first of its kind community and co-working space for women entrepreneurs in Manhattan, which opened in 2007. In Good Company served thousands of women entrepreneurs and has helped shape the shared workspace industry of today.

Adelaide’s focus on racial justice galvanized while earning her BA in educational studies and sociology from Colgate University. She went on to earn a MA in organizational psychology and a M Ed in Counseling Psychology from Teacher’s College at Columbia University, where she studied racial identity development and group dynamics.

Adelaide is an active parent in her school district, a proud supporter and active participant of many civic organizations and racial justice initiatives. She is particularly honored to serve as a founding board member for Forward Through Ferguson — the organizational outgrowth of the Ferguson Commission report.

Mitchell is the curator of popular American art and culture at Washington University in St. Louis in the Julian Edison Department of Special Collections. Aside from his appointment in Washington University Libraries, he also teaches courses on race, media and social movements in the Program for American Culture Studies in Arts & Sciences. His courses employ an interdisciplinary perspective that reflect his varied interests in history, literature, music and art. Mitchell has lectured extensively outside the academy, from jazz clubs to community centers. His public lectures have focused on music and popular culture, covering everything from jazz icon, Max Roach’s classic album, “The Freedom Now Suite,” to hip-hop legend Jay-Z’s more recent 2018 Grammy nominated “4:44.”

Mitchell earned his PhD in American history (focused on African American political and religious thought) from Cornell University. Prior to his position at Washington University, he served as visiting affiliate fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. Currently, Mitchell is working on several projects, most notably his forthcoming book, Jazz Age Jesus: The Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., and the Ministry of Black Empowerment, which is a culmination of his doctoral work. Mitchell argues that the Rev. Powell’s ministry was an important and understudied catalyst for the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance and played in integral role in the larger New Negro Movement of the early decades of the twentieth century.

De Nichols is a designer, social entrepreneur and keynote lecturer who mobilizes young creative change makers through the production of interactive experiences, digital media and social initiatives.

Based in St. Louis, Mo., De is the principal of design & social practice at Civic Creatives, a design and strategy collective she founded in 2015 to help cities more boldly develop creative solutions for the civic and social challenges residents face. As a national keynote presenter and lecturer, De champions the power of design and storytelling to inspire and equip audiences to spark creative social change across their communities.

Because of her leadership, Nichols has been deemed as a national Ideas that Matter recipient, a two-time Clinton Global Initiative innovator and a St. Louis Visionary for her community impact. She additionally is a 2017/18 Citizen Artist Fellow of the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts and a 2018 Artist Fellow with the Regional Arts Commission in St. Louis, Mo.

Jason Purnell’s research focuses on how socioeconomic and sociocultural factors influence health behaviors and health outcomes and on mobilizing community action to address the social determinants of health. He currently leads Health Equity Works, the newly expanded and named mission of the Brown School initiative previously referred to as For the Sake of All. Health Equity Works is committed to St. Louis and to translating data and research into collaborative community action to advance health equity. Their work in St. Louis continues and will expand in school health, economic opportunity, early childhood, quality neighborhoods and housing.

Stanley is senior producer of “The City,” a podcast from USA Today that explores how power works in American cities. She previously co-hosted and produced We Live Here, an award-winning podcast about race & class from St. Louis Public Radio & PRX. Before that, she was an investigative beat reporter for several years at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. She stays busy outside of journalism too, running a storytelling organization, a brunch club for women of color and nurturing her own entrepreneurial endeavors. She’s a Michigan native, a dog owner, a yogi and music enthusiast. Kameel is based in St. Louis.

Blake Strode is the executive director of ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit civil rights law firm in St. Louis, Missouri providing holistic legal advocacy and combating the criminalization of poverty and state violence against poor people and people of color.

Blake is a native of the St. Louis region and joined ArchCity as a Skadden Fellow and staff attorney following his graduation from Harvard Law School in 2015. Blake attended the University of Arkansas and majored in international economics and Spanish. Blake helped to establish the Civil Rights Litigation unit at ArchCity, which has brought challenges to a variety of unlawful and predatory practices including debtors’ prisons, police misconduct, and inhumane jail conditions, among others. In the past few years, Blake and his colleagues have filed more than 50 civil rights cases in state and federal court, impacting upwards of 40,000 people in the St. Louis region. Blake also played a significant role in the class-action debtors’ prison case against the City of Jennings, Missouri that reached final settlement in December 2016. The landmark case provides a blueprint for permanent legal reform in the region’s courts and afforded monetary relief to hundreds of individuals who were jailed because of their inability to pay court debts.

Blake has spoken at conferences and panels throughout the country and recently authored multiple columns and essays for national publications on issues of race, policing and criminal justice, including co-authoring “Debtors’ Prison in 21st-Century America,” which appeared in The Atlantic in February 2016.

Paul Woodruff has served as the executive director of Prosperity Connection since 2013. Woodruff also manages strategic community initiatives for St. Louis Community Credit Union (SLCCU) as their vice president of community development. In this dual role, Woodruff is charged with overseeing and guiding the direction of numerous community outreach initiatives supported by both organizations, whose cooperative aim is to improve and better the lifestyle of low-income families throughout the St. Louis region.

Woodruff is an advisor and board member for several community and national groups, was a member of the Economic Inequity & Opportunity subcommittee of the Ferguson Commission, and serves as a Board member for Inclusiv.

He received his master’s degree in public administration (with a certificate in organizational development) from Saint Louis University where his research focused on credit union alternatives to payday loans.  He earned a bachelor of arts degree in political science and speech communication from McKendree University.