Elisheva has more than 15 years’ experience in community organizing, nonprofit management and youth development – all, in some way, working towards youth justice and decarceration reform.

The early part of her journey was marked by instability and trauma which included parents dealing with PTSD and substance abuse and an abusive relationship in her teen years that ended with her being brutally beaten and left for dead. She survived thanks to the police officer that found her and stayed with her while awaiting an ambulance.

As a survivor of crime, she was left to navigate the justice system and the aftermath without help or support. Neither her voice nor her needs were considered by the system that was only interested in punishing her perpetrator. Even though she was living with unhealed trauma, she had young children to care for and used what she had at her disposal.  She didn’t always make the best decisions for herself, resulting in a felony and several misdemeanors.  But when it came to her boys she was a tireless advocate working to ensure they were raised in a home with love and the resources she expertly navigated the system to obtain.

Seeing the criminal legal system firsthand, as both a victim and as someone who made mistakes, she understood early that it is an incubator for cycles of harm – one that criminalizes poverty, trauma and survival, especially for Black and brown communities. She saw that in most cases, simply locking people away did nothing to address the root causes or heal the pain experienced by both victims and those who cause harm.

Elisheva  joined the fight for economic justice with Michigan United’s Fight for Fifteen and became deeply involved in ending the school-to-prison pipeline in Kalamazoo County, Michigan. In fact, her work in this area began before she even understood what the “pipeline” was or that what she was doing was called “organizing.” How is this possible? Her youngest son has had a learning disability his entire life and that disability impacts the way he interacts with the world, including the school system. From his first day in kindergarten, Elisheva was advocating to keep him from being expelled for behavior the school didn’t understand was tied to his learning disability. She saw that other mothers were facing some of the same fights and began sharing information with them and gathering them into group conversations about what was happening to their children and what to do about it.  Over time, this led to being one of the founders of S.E.E.Change, now led by George White.  There she advocated for supports like tutoring for suspended students and fought to ensure children with IEPs received all the services they deserved.

Her advocacy for Kalamazoo youth also included fighting for 3 young men of color all facing very long or lifetime sentences. And she helped expose $17 million in unused funds at a school where 89% of the children were medicated without their parents’ full understanding and a secret contract between the superintendent, sheriff and prosecutor to funnel students directly into the criminal legal system.

Elisheva’s passion and commitment to justice has been nurtured through opportunities such as:

• Shadowing Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, as a 2014 artist-in-residence and social justice fellow at Kalamazoo College.
• Training with the Black Panthers leaders in California 2012
• Leading training sessions at a 2015 national conference focused on moving restorative justice from the margins to the center.
• Organizers School with PEOPLE’S ACTION
• Mentorship from Angela Davis

Those experiences and relationships were the foundation upon which she:

• was one of the founders of Michigan Liberation which focused on ending mass incarceration, uplifting impacted communities and involving returning citizens in organizing work.
• served on the steering committee that brought Nation Outside to fruition.
• founded Emergent Justice