Board of Directors

Imani Worthy became an impacted parent in 2019, when ACS came into her life and changed everything. Since then, she has facilitated training for the National Association of Social Workers, the American Bar Association, Foster America, and the National Court of Appointed Special Advocates (CASA). She has also created trainings for parents pertaining to mindfulness, embodiment, systemic oppression, toxic stress, public narrative, and public speaking. Her experiences and mentorship have also played a key role in the City College of New York's Inaugural Social Justice Fellowship, a program designed to train young social justice advocates.

For nearly a decade, Erin Miles Cloud had the privilege of being a family defense attorney at the Bronx Defenders where she worked to defend parents from one of our most violent carceral systems: Child Protective Services. Often exempted from analysis of structural violence, Erin came to learn that the foster care system is one of the most profoundly racist institutions in America.   

As a supervising attorney and then team leader at Bronx Defenders, Erin met children who grew up in the foster system, only to be later judged as parents by the institutions that “raised” them. She tried to fight the civil death penalty—termination of parental rights—but for Black and Latinx families, this seemed an impossible battle to win. The challenges her clients' families faced were ones that many families face: substance use, intimate partner violence, and mental illness, etc. However, because of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, the response to these social issues was always punishment. One of Erin's students in her externship class at Columbia quickly made this connection after just one day in family court. She said that “families everywhere struggle, but only the low-income, Brown, and Black find themselves at the mercy of the child welfare system”.

Like many others, CPS has become involved with Erin's family. Also, like many others, she has not seen this system heal or protect her family members. Erin believes that movement theory is an integral component to radical shifts in thinking and policy that may give us the possibility to be better, do better, and end the punishment and policing of families.

Bianca Shaw is a queer, Black femme from the Bronx. Bianca is a facilitator, consultant, social worker, healing practitioner and aspiring coach. She also formerly served as Co-Executive Director at RISE, an organization that centers the lived experiences and leadership of parents impacted by the child welfare system. Her work sits at the intersection of race, class, and reproductive justice. 

Bianca built RISE’s organizational capacity by developing and evaluating programs as well as creating pathways for leadership development. Through popular education and healing-justice practices, Bianca co-created an organizational culture at RISE that is rooted in relationship and community building, collective care and radical reimagination. Bianca believes that we need many people, gifts and strategies to create a liberated world, and that those who put their time and energy to be on the frontline for freedom deserve to be cared for, invested in, and have access to joy and rest just as much as we seek to create those conditions for others.