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Funds are now VERY limited for Scholarships. Your help is much appreciated! Click Here to | BACKGROUND BITS > Breaking News! Three Preeminent Speakers
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Adam J. Foss is a former Assistant District Attorney in the Juvenile Division of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Boston MA. Currently, he sits on the Massachusetts Governor’s Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee and is a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School. As a fierce advocate for criminal justice reform, he champions the importance of the role of the prosecutor in ending mass incarceration. Mr. Foss is on the Executive Board of the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association and chairs its Community Service Committee. He is the chair of the Criminal Justice Section Council of the Massachusetts Bar Association and sits on the Criminal Justice Section Steering Committee of the Boston Bar Association In both his professional and personal capacities, Mr. Foss volunteers much of his time to the community in which he works, including the creation of a diversion program for first time juvenile offenders in the Suffolk County Juvenile Court. He is also the co-founder of a collaborative effort in Roxbury court called the Roxbury CHOICE Program, an initiative to turn probation from a punitive sentence into a beneficial relationship with the court, the probation department, and the District Attorney’s Office. Recently two important honors have been bestowed on Attorney Foss. He was named Graduate of the Last Decade by his alma mater, Suffolk University Law School. The Mandela Foundation recognized Mr. Foss as the 2017 Nelson Mandela Changemaker award recipient. To see more, watch the TED Talk at 
Bernard Lafayette has been recognized as a major authority on strategies for nonviolent social change in the world. Emerging as one of the young activists from the Freedom Riders, in 1963 he become the Director of SNCC”s (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) Alabama voter registration project. Lafayette marched with Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma to gain voter rights for African Americans and worked with him until King’s death. After Selma, Lafayette worked in Chicago with members of the American Friends Service Committee on their Open Housing Movement. It was that relationship that brought Dr. Lafayette and the Quakers together again when inmates at the “Think Tank” at Greenhaven Prison in New York had who had witnessed the Attica riots and were concerned with the recidivism revolving door, wanted program for non-violence in their prison. The result, AVP was conceived with Dr. Lafayette as one of the original creators.
Robin Casarjian, M.A. is the Founder and Director of the Lionheart Foundation and its National Emotional Literacy Projects. She is an educator, public speaker, writer, and consultant. In developing and implementing programming for prisoners and youth-at-risk, she draws from her experience as director of a school for at-risk adolescents, as well as extensive experience in education, stress management training, psychotherapy and administration. She is author of Forgiveness: A Bold Choice for a Peaceful Heart (Bantam, 1992) and Houses of Healing: A Prisoner’s Guide to Inner Power and Freedom (Lionheart Press, 1995), and co-author, with Bethany Casarjian, Ph.D., of Power Source: Taking Charge of Your Life (Lionheart Press, 2003)