So answering this question about where did I get or how did I get to where I am today? It's a long story it literally is and it really starts with my childhood. If I could just speak in bullet points about my life, my parents are immigrants, my parents divorced sadly when I was just eight years old and by age 12 I had an abusive stepfather. As a teenager, I was very neglected and abandoned. My dad disappeared on me, my actual biological father left when I was around 14 I haven't seen them since. My next teenage years were full of trauma, pain, abuse, neglect, and abandonment piled on. So I started dealing with the best way I understood how with the kids that were experiencing a very similar situation as myself was through self medicate, which was through marijuana and which was through alcohol for me as a teenager. And though I was a good kid in school it was difficult for me to focus because of the traumas that I had was very heavy. By age 17 my mother remarried and moved out of state and about a year later I was kicked out of my home and I lived homeless. So by the age of 17, I was sleeping in cars, parks, friend's houses, couches anywhere I could. Sadly, by the age of 18 as a young, homeless, parentless, and high school dropout I participated in a crime and because of that, a tragedy took place not by the hands of me directly but by the person who was struggling with his mental health, who was not taking his medication and subsequently I was charged and I was eventually sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. So my next 16 years I had spent inside of a prison facility but during that time I took accountability and responsibility. I also saw how services that were not provided for me as a youth growing up, whether they were peer mentorship or role models, whether they were substance recovery counseling, whether they were trauma therapy for people who could not afford it like myself, whether they were housing for teenagers or adults who were homeless that stuff didn't exist for me growing up all the funding went to policing and prisons and that's where I ended up because of these weren't met. During my incarceration with the help of my co-founder Alex Malik I decided to co-found the organization called Restore Justice. And in general, the idea was a lot of people and policymakers make decisions and policies based on their experiences but not our experiences so our idea of what we need to bring proximate the legislators or people who are in charge of community members, funders, donors, whoever it is, everybody needs to meet people who are incarcerated and from that, we would do policies. So our work became from proximity to policy, and it wasn't just come into prison, it wasn't just to meet somebody it was more like have a sit-down, let's talk let's discuss for 2,3,4 hours. From that we ended up doing a piece of legislation in California that was around my circumstances, and I ended up being the first person re-sentenced under a bill that we helped create from our own organization, which was created within a prison. So after 16 years I was serving a 25 life sentence the same judge that sentenced me to 25 to life re-sentenced me to 3 years and she said, since you've done more than five times that amount, I'm releasing you today. So after 16 years of incarceration since the age of 18 I was released that day and I stepped into a role of not just co founder by the executive director of the organization that continues to do this work.

So when we started doing the project, it was before our nonprofit became the firewall 1CC the official tag of what nonprofits are from the government. So we were already doing the work and the work was bringing in people who have been affected by harm and meeting people who have committed harm and finding restorative and transformative legislation around that. So the work continued for the first few weeks and months and actually for a couple of years, our work is to bring in legislators into a prison facility, to bring in district attorneys into a prison facility, to bring in people who were stakeholders and decision-makers, people from the governor's office into the prison system and from that create the policy. I will say it wasn't until very, very, very recently and honestly during the pandemic where our organization had to take not just a look at ourselves, but more so of an urgent response to prisons and our jail population in the time of COVID and so to recover that obviously our work, which depends on bringing people into a prison facility, we couldn't do that anymore because of COVID. So we had to take an urgent I guess the evolution or remorse of organization really quickly to respond urgently to the COVID, to reduce the prison population, to do it safely, to provide proper PPE to the people who are inside so that took place. Then immediately about two months later, you're seeing an uprising happening in the United States. So as we shifted towards COVID, we had to do another layer of urgent response to the protests and the uprising that is happening. So what I want is to just kind of enclosing off with this question is to share that our work relies heavily on proximity, meaning having a physical closeness to people who are affected by the problem. We were unable to do that directly in the prison facility, and so we had to change and come up with ideas to continue doing the work around mass incarceration, continue doing the workaround extreme sentencing, or death sentences in prison. For example, I was sentenced to die in prison as an 18-year old I have friends who are sentenced to die in prison. They were given 25 to life sentences which means you spend your next 25 years or to life in prison, which is the slow death sentence or sentences that are life without the possibility with your parole. Basically you're sent to die, you're irredeemable is what you're being told by the courts so that work continued, but it kept being shifted and morphed into adjusting to what's happening around in our world today.

I think the biggest challenge was how do I do this from prison? Serving a life sentence where I literally don't have access to people. So the concept of prison is to keep you away from society, it's a sad concept it's not public safety because this community provides public safety. So how do I as a person who was serving a life sentence in a prison find community and so that was a big challenge. But we did have a select amount of volunteers and community-based organizers that were coming to this very particular prison, not all the prisons in California have this access to the community. So with the limited resources this idea came up with myself and my co-founder and she became the conduit to the outside world for me and because of that I would organize inside everything that I needed to and on top of that strategized meticulously strategies, okay this is the plan, this is how we move forward, this is what we try to invite so she and I would create a team outside. All the way down I really credit her for not taking over the project meeting like, hey I'm free, I'm privileged, I'm going to take over the project. It was more like, no how do I center you as an incarcerated person and how do I center you all as incarcerated people as the leaders. That was a very benefit of life centering us and not allowing us to lead all the way down to like I was in a prison. I had fundraised from prison by inviting a fundraiser into the prison so her job would be to go out and bring them. The challenge was, how do we find donors? How do we find a community of people who want to donate? Because this is a nonprofit and how do we get them literally cleared into a prison to come in and then speak to me? I mean, there were barriers to barriers that we had to deal with. But we strategized around what we could do and so those are some of the challenges. I think more challenges work, creating a team, and I don't even have access or communication with them directly. So we don't have cell phones, there's no Internet, there's no email, and there are no text messages. There is literally this one person that's going in and out of the prison facility and exchanging messages and coming back the next day or a few days later to deliver a message in a world where everything is instantaneous. So those were challenges and furthermore the communication was a big challenge but finding resources finding further support, how does someone like her convince people outside in the world that hey, there's a bunch of people inside the need your help, so messaging that and inviting people and having people commit to coming inside and meeting us was a challenge as well.