Rabbi Joui Hessel is the Vice President of Jewish Life at the Bronfman Center for Jewish Life at 92Y.

Prior to this position, she served Washington Hebrew Congregation for 13 years; first as a pulpit rabbi and then as Rabbi and Director of Religious Education and Jewish Engagement overseeing one of the nation’s largest religious schools. She has also served as an Assistant Director for Recruitment and Admissions at HUC-JIR and as adjunct and clinical faculty for the HUC-JIR NY School of Education.

Rabbi Hessel was ordained from the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, NY in June 2001. Rabbi Hessel also received a Master's Degree in Hebrew Letters in 1998 and a Master's Degree in Jewish Education in 1999, both from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Rabbi Hessel has co-authored The Hanukkah Family Treasury, published by Running Hill Press. She has also been published in the CCAR’s publications The Sacred Encounter (2014) and Mishkan T’fila for Youth (2014), Moment Magazine (June 2007) as well as in a book on parenting young adult children, Mom, Can I Move Back in with You: A Survival Guide for Parents of Twentysomethings, published by Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium. Rabbi Hessel has offered the opening prayer at the United States House of Representatives and at the White House on the National Day of Prayer. She served as an auxiliary board member of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, representing the Women’s Rabbinic Network.

Rabbi Hessel lives in Greenwich, Connecticut with her sassy and precocious five-year-old daughter. She sits on the Board of Directors for both the United Way of Greenwich and the UJA/JCC Greenwich.

The BIA Cherokee Agency has announced that Brandon Stephens, an EBCI tribal member, will serve as the director of Tribal Realty Services. He will be responsible for Tribal Realty Services, Tribal Surveying, and Geographic Information System (GIS).

Stephens previously served the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in several capacities most recently as the Deputy of Housing. Since 2012, he has served as the development director for United South and Eastern Tribes (USET). During his time at USET, he initiated a new economic development program and launched a new community development financial institution (CDFI) to serve USET members.

Brandon recently earned a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Tennessee – Knoxville and recently completed work on a Master of Public Administration at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Vivian D. Nixon is Writer in Residence at The Square One Project. She contributes to the Racial Justice and Abolition Democracy (RJAD) Project and the narrative of racial reckoning.

Recently retired, Vivian gained 20-years of leadership experience at College & Community Fellowship (CCF), a nonprofit that helps women with criminal convictions earn college degrees. She enrolled in CCF as a student upon her release from prison. In 2006, she became executive director, exponentially increasing the organization’s resources and impact. The CCF community made significant contributions to public policy initiatives that restored Pell grant eligibility to incarcerated college students.

During the time Vivian spent in prison she was moved to write and speak about issues that promote spiritual, physical, and economic health for women who are subject to structurally biased social systems. In her new role as a writer, she tries to break through walls of stigma and reveal the wisdom these women offer to a world that often overlooks their worth.

Vivian earned an MFA from Columbia School of the Arts and has received the John Jay Medal for Justice, the Ascend Fellowship at the Aspen Institute, the Soros Justice Fellowship, and the Pen America Writing for Justice Fellowship. In May 2021, she was granted an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Bard College.

Artist and activist Kenyatta Emmanuel Hughes has shared his music from Sing Sing to Carnegie Hall, offering a full live concert the same day of his release after serving 24½ years in prison. His music and message explore personal transformation, the beauty of life, love, and the human condition. He is currently an Artist in Residence at the Initiative for a Just Society at Columbia Law School.

As founder of Opportunity Justice, Tommy conceived of and is leading the Spatial Justice Project. Prior to launching Opportunity Justice, Tommy co-founded the innovative non-profit Refoundry in 2015, and as its main architect and strategist ran the organization and was its driving force through February 2021. A thought leader in criminal and economic justice, Tommy has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., and on Huffington Post, Upworthy, Free Enterprise and other major media. He’s partnered with entities from the ReEntry Acceleration Program (REAP) at Columbia University’s Tamer Center for Social Enterprise to Shake Shack, The Moth, the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the NYC Department of Corrections. Tommy’s been a featured speaker at the Social Innovation Summit, the Wagner School for Public for Public Service at NYU, Opportunity Collaborative, the Brooklyn DA’s Task Force for Reentry and elsewhere. Before his transition to social justice work, Tommy was a serial entrepreneur in the home furnishings industry, with businesses in design, manufacturing, and retail. He holds a Masters in Critical Theory from the University of Michigan and has developed curriculum and taught classes in creative writing, literature, and literary theory.

Eric Gonzalez made history in November 2017 when he became the first Latino District Attorney elected in New York State. He had been appointed Acting District Attorney by Governor Andrew Cuomo a year earlier following the tragic death of his predecessor, the late Ken Thompson, for whom Gonzalez had served as Chief Assistant District Attorney.

DA Gonzalez began his legal career in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office upon his graduation from law school in 1995 and spent several years as a junior and then senior assistant in various bureaus within the office, including the Sex Crimes and Special Victims Bureau, Domestic Violence Bureau, Orange Zone Trial Bureau, and Green Zone Trial Bureau, where he was promoted to Chief. During his career Gonzalez tried a full range of cases, including homicides.

Promoted by District Attorney Thompson in March of 2014, DA Gonzalez was instrumental in the office’s smooth transition during the change of administrations. Gonzalez successfully guided the launch of several key initiatives, including the creation of the office’s nationally-recognized Conviction Review Unit and the office policy of declining to prosecute the possession of marijuana, which he framed and implemented.

Since his appointment to lead the office, DA Gonzalez has implemented his own trailblazing initiatives, including bail reform, a Young Adult Court, expansion of non-prosecution of marijuana possession, a pre-court diversion program for low-level drug offenders and a policy to reduce unfair immigration consequences in criminal cases.

Following his swearing in as District Attorney in January, Gonzalez launched a ground-breaking initiative known as Justice 2020, to help him carry out his vision of keeping Brooklyn safe and strengthening trust in our justice system by ensuring fairness and equal justice for all. Justice 2020 consists of a 17-point action plan – created by a committee of criminal justice reform experts, defense groups, service providers, law enforcement, formerly incarcerated individuals, clergy and community leaders – to make the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office a national model of what a progressive prosecutor’s office can be. This blueprint will transform the work of Gonzalez’s office by shifting toward preventative and accountability solutions with a track record of success, and away from over-reliance on criminal convictions and incarceration.

DA Gonzalez grew up in East New York and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and attended John Dewey High School in Coney Island. He graduated from Cornell University in 1992 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with a dual major in government and history. In 1995, he received his Juris Doctorate from the University of Michigan Law School, where he was president of the Latino Law Students Association.

He resides in Brooklyn, less than a mile from where he grew up, with his wife and three boys.

Yolanda Johnson-Peterkin has been working to serve people with criminal justice histories for over a decade; prior to her current role as Chief of Housing Community Activities at NYCHA, Yolanda was Director of Operations for Reentry at the Women’s Prison Association. This position gives her an opportunity to work on systemic change by reunifying formerly incarcerated people with their families. This unique program is one of the first across the United States and is the lead for duplication across the country. Mrs. Johnson Peterkin and her peers published an article in the Race/Ethnicity Journal titled “Life Capacity Beyond Reentry: A Critical Examination of Racism and Prisoner Reentry Reform in the US.” Yolanda received her Master’s degree in Social Work from Hunter College. She has received honors from the Correctional Association of New York, Citizens Against Recidivism, and the NAACP.