ELECTORAL JUSTICE VOTER FUND

Jessica Byrd is a co-founder and chief doer of the Electoral Justice Project. She is also the founder of Three Point Strategies, which provides a home for electoral strategy that centers racial justice and is transformational rather than transactional. Jessica has worked on campaigns in 43 states, and you can find her at the side of the most exciting races to elect Black women in the country, training hundreds of leaders and building tools to serve the movement. In 2016, Jessica was named the January Woman to Watch by Essence magazine, one of “12 New Faces of Black Leadership” by Time magazine, and one of the most influential millennials shaping the 2016 election by Rolling Stone.

Founder and executive director of the People’s Advocacy Institute and campaign manager for the successful Committee to Elect Chokwe Antar Lumumba for Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, Rukia Lumumba is a transformative justice strategist and community organizer. Named a “New Activist” by Essence magazine and an “Emerging Leader” by the Congressional Black Caucus, the daughter of community justice icon the late Mayor Chokwe Lumumba and Nubia Lumumba, Rukia continues the Lumumba family’s rich history of advancing issues and initiatives that elevate the legal, economical, health and educational rights of individuals, families and communities. For more than 18 years, she has worked within and outside the system to foster justice for all, especially as it relates to criminal justice disparities for people of color. She has served as director of two of New York state’s largest criminal justice nonprofits, CASES (the Center for Alternatives Sentencing and Employment Services) and the Center for Community Alternatives, providing visionary leadership and building community and system partnerships to help break the prison pipeline.

Kayla Reed (she/her) is a Black queer activist and organizer from St. Louis, Missouri. After the killing of Michael Brown, Jr. in August 2014, Kayla was catapulted into organizing around issues of racial justice, economic justice, and policing. She has worked on campaigns in partnerships with organizations such as Advancement Project, Color of Change, Organization for Black Struggle, and ArchCity Defenders, where she now serves as a member of the Board of Directors.

She currently serves as director of Action St. Louis, a millennial Black-led collective working to build political power in the city of St. Louis through civic engagement and strategic political action. The collective worked to get Kimberly Gardner elected as the city’s first Black circuit attorney and also supported Tishaura Jones’ campaign for Mayor in 2017. Kayla is also co-founder and lead organizer of the Electoral Justice Project (EJP), a national campaign of the Movement for Black Lives, that seeks to expand and mobilize the Black electorate to achieve victories on the ballot.

Kayla has been published in the Washington Post and Huffington Post and was recognized as one of CNN’s Disruptors and by Delux Magazine in their inaugural Power 100 List. She is featured in the critically acclaimed documentary Whose Streets?,directed by Damon Davis and Sabaah Folayan. In her spare time, she graduated from Washington University in Saint Louis, where she majored in Sociology and African/African-American Studies.