Ambassadors for Racial Justice
The Ambassadors for Racial Justice (ARJ) program (hosted by the Georgetown Juvenile Justice Initiative and The Gault Center)(This link opens in a new tab) is a nationally recognized, one-of-a-kind program for frontline youth defenders and youth justice advocates (e.g., appellate defenders or policy experts in defender offices, etc.) who strive to challenge racial injustice in the juvenile legal system.
ARJ inspires and prepares dedicated frontline youth defenders and youth justice advocates throughout the nation to assume leadership roles and develop strategies to combat racial inequities in their respective jurisdictions, and throughout the country. The 12-month-program (1) encourages and supports defenders and advocates as they challenge racial injustices through legal advocacy, (2) engages defenders and advocates in systemic and policy reform, and (3) equips defenders and advocates with tools they need to initiate and lead difficult conversations about race. By creating a robust community of youth defenders and advocates who will share their challenges and successes, the program also seeks to (4) grow and retain a cadre of attorneys with diverse backgrounds in the fight for youth justice. During the year-long program, Ambassadors attend two leadership retreat weekends, participate in monthly webinars, and complete a capstone project of their own design. With the training and support of the ARJ leadership team from the Georgetown Juvenile Justice Clinic & Initiative and The Gault Center, Ambassadors have become racial justice leaders in their jurisdictions and have introduced legislation, successfully incorporated race in their litigation strategies, convened trainings to advance reform, designed college-bound pipeline programs for detained youth, and so much more!
The ARJ program is part of the racial justice initiatives launched by Professor Kristin Henning and the Juvenile Justice Initiative (JJI) team in partnership with the Gault Center. In 2018, JJI launched and expanded a number of racial justice projects designed to assist youth of color in the juvenile legal system who face significant hurdles to success and to improve the juvenile defense practice by training defenders on emerging racial justice issues such as implicit racial bias and race and adolescence.
Meet the 2026 Ambassadors for Racial Justice
Alex Bellow is the 9th of 11 children born to the Late Mr. Aaron A. Bellow, Sr., and Mrs. Mary Theresa Bellow. He was raised in Lake Charles, LA and has made Jefferson Parish, Louisiana his home for more than 30 years. Alex has been married to Dr. Shawan Bellow for over 29 years, and together they are the proud parents and guardians of three amazing young ladies: Jasmine Alexandria, Julianne Alexis, and Ja’Sani Miracle.
To better serve his community as a social justice advocate, Alex earned a Juris Doctor degree and a Certificate in Social Justice. He is a servant at heart. Alex has served as a Senior Pastor for over 27 years. He and his wife, Dr. Bellow, founded Hosanna Fellowship Church of Gretna in 2002 with an expressed mission to “Serve Christ by Serving His People.” Alex is a 2024 Gillis Long Public Service awardee and LSBA Pro Bono Award recipient. Alex was also a proud recipient of the 2024 Spirit of Ignatius Award, which is the highest award conferred upon a graduating Juris Doctor candidate at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law.
“Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage: Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.” St. Augustine
Amity Bjork is a criminal defense attorney in Tacoma, Washington. Her practice focuses on youth and young adults charged with serious violent crimes. Amity grew up in Maine. She realized that she wanted to be a public defender after doing a public defense clinic during her third year of law school in New Hampshire. She was a public defender in Seattle for eight years before going into private practice in 2006. Changing her practice to mainly represent youth and young adults has taken place over the past five or six years.
She attended YDAP Summer Academy in 2023 and has attended the annual Summits. She works with a small group of Gault program attendees in Washington to create opportunities for youth defenders around the state to connect and share experiences and common concerns. An interest in policy work and advocating for youth outside of the courtroom has grown since the shift in her practice. She is active on committees in Washington, including one formed to create proposed legislation to raise the age of juvenile court jurisdiction and a subcommittee of the state Sentencing Guidelines Commission to expand youth sentencing alternatives.
“Until the killing of black men, of black mothers’ sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother’s son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.” – Ella Baker
“When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something.” – John Lewis
Madalyn Cohee is an assistant public defender at the Maryland Office of the Public Defender in the Mental Health Division. She represents children and adults facing involuntary civil commitment in private hospitals as well as individuals at state forensic hospitals. She is a proud Maryland native and completed both her undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Maryland. While at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, she was a student attorney with the Youth, Education, and Justice Clinic where she represented students removed from schools, and individuals serving life sentences for crimes committed when they were emerging adults. Madalyn was the recipient of the Anne Barlow Gallagher Prize for Service to Children and Youth and the William P. Cunningham Award for Exceptional Scholarship. Madalyn is also an adjunct professor at Stevenson University in the undergraduate legal studies department.
“You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance . . . You have to get close.” – Bryan Stevenson
Adrian Dubose is a staff attorney at the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights. He is proud and humbled to be able to practice law and represent children who grew up in the same neighborhoods and attended the same schools as he did as a kid. Adrian graduated from Warren Easton Charter High School with a dual enrollment technician certification in residential electrician from Delgado Community College. He graduated from Louisiana State University with a Bachelor’s degree in Mass Communications, concentrating in Political Communications, and a minor in Philosophy. Adrian then graduated from Southern University Law Center in May 2024 and passed the Louisiana bar in July 2024. The summer before attending law school, Adrian worked as a state legislature reporter.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” – James Baldwin
Natalie Hollabaugh is a staff attorney at Youth, Rights & Justice (YRJ) in Portland. Natalie first clerked for YRJ as a law student and returned as a lawyer in 2023. Prior to her work at YRJ, Natalie was a 2021 Equal Justice Works Fellow working in the juvenile justice system where she represented several youth who had been waived into adult court, helped launch a statewide juvenile record expunction clinic, and worked alongside the Gault Center to publish a guide to collateral consequences for practitioners and youth alike. During law school she traveled across the state to youth prisons to deliver Know Your Rights presentations and to help youth file legal paperwork. She went to law school due to the systemic inequities she witnessed as a public school science teacher for several years. Her passion for working with teens and their families has translated into over a decade of advocacy. She currently teaches Juvenile Justice at her alma mater, Lewis & Clark Law School. She is a member of the Gault Center Western Region Board, and a former Executive Committee member and officer for the Oregon State Bar Juvenile Law Section. She has organized several juvenile law CLEs for Oregon practitioners, specifically focused on Access to Justice and juvenile law.
“Our national reckoning with race and inequality must include disability. Race and disability have a complicated but interconnected history. Yet discussions of our most salient socio-political issues such as police violence, prison abolition, healthcare, poverty, and education continue to treat race and disability as distinct, largely biologically based distinctions justifying differential treatment in law and policy.” – Jasmine E. Harris
Elly Hoopes is an attorney licensed to practice in California and Colorado. She is currently a solo practitioner working in Northern California. She is a contract panel attorney appointed on Criminal and Dependency matters in the Del Norte Superior Court of California where her focus is youth defense. Elly has represented youth, people under 18, in delinquency and dependency proceedings for almost twenty years. First in Colorado, where she worked as a deputy public defender for over a decade eventually becoming the supervising attorney over the Youth Division in Douglas County, Colorado.
Elly left Colorado for California to work for the Yurok Tribe in Klamath, California. This was a natural segue for Elly moving from an adjunct academic position teaching Native American Law at her alma mater at the Sturm College of Law at the University of Denver to practice what she taught. Elly was Executive Director and Associate General Counsel for the Yurok Tribe, the largest Indian Tribe in California. In 2021 she embarked upon her solo practice to expand her efforts to include policy work with the goal to improve and impact the treatment of youths by courts throughout California and the United States. Elly currently represents the majority of youths facing delinquency proceedings in the Del Norte Superior Court of California.
Elly is an environmental and humanitarian advocate working with local programs in Nepal and Mongolia while also designing and leading rigorous travel trips to both regions and Tibet. She has a lengthy history working in rural habitats around the world and is a youth environmental educator for Experience Learning in West Virginia. Elly currently sits on the Advisory Board for the California Youth Defender Center, the Trillium Teen Center Board, the Del Norte School Attendance Review Board, the steering committee for the Rural Allied Defenders list serve and was a 2023 Rural Justice Fellow. She is a statewide ICWA trainer for the California Public Defenders.
Elly believes that a healthy environment requires both healthy ecosystems and healthy people. She works to make that happen. Elly is committed to representing those who are our highest-risk youth and working to assure that they remain a part of their community. It is respect and dignity for the people and culture, no matter where they are from, that allows for the highest degree of success. It is through promoting healthy habitats and making that connection with home that the best outcome is reached for her clients in particular and society in general. Most important is that the cause of the defenseless and the oppressed is met and that justice serves all.
Regarding sixteen-year-old Raymond Mattz, (Mattz v. Arnett, 412 U.S. 481, 488 (1973)), the 19th, and last time he was arrested for illegal fishing, after the wardens couldn’t navigate the river: “They handed Ray the drum and started singing an Indian song, with Ray drumming. It was rhythmic, repetitive chant that grew stronger and stronger through the three times it was sung. The night was quiet, and the family’s voices projected off the wall of the eastern ridge to the hills surrounding the River, making it larger than life. The river joined in, singing in concert with its flow’s steady roar.” – Amy Bowers Cordalis, The Water Remembers
Wynn Horton is an Assistant Public Defender working for the Virginia Indigent Defense Commission in Chesapeake, Virginia. A graduate of the University of Cincinnati College of Law (JD ’21) and Houghton University (BA ’14), he is originally from western New York but has been in Virginia now for over a decade. At work he practices primarily in the Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court, with a caseload that includes both adults and children. Over the past four years he has developed an emphasis and reputation for working with clients who have a serious mental illness diagnosis and/or who struggle with substance use disorders. He leads his office’s Behavioral Health Docket team and is a member of the Recovery Court team. For about two years he also assisted in coordinating the local Restoration and Competency Docket – helping to arrange services and support for clients and their families. Prior to working as an attorney, he served several organizations in the nonprofit world – including a workforce training position in which he helped survivors of abuse gain skills to work in professional bakeries (and he is a cupcake wizard as a result).
“Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously. We are more likely to be sensitive to the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective. However, changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness.” – Grace Lee Boggs
Serena Hughley is an Assistant Public Defender in the Fulton County Public Defender’s Office. Raised in McDonough and Columbus, Georgia, she is a fifth-generation Georgia native and is committed to helping members of her community heal, grow, and be seen in their full humanity, especially the youngest among us.
A graduate of Spelman College and Harvard Law School, Serena began her path in youth advocacy by volunteering weekly at M. Agnes Jones Elementary School and at the Fulton County Juvenile Justice Center’s weekend diversion program. She has also worked with the Southern Center for Human Rights, Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Center for Children’s Law and Policy.
As a 2023 Equal Justice Works Fellow at the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, Serena represented young people aged 13 to 20 in youth and adult detention facilities across Louisiana, advocating for their safety, education, medical care, and release. She later participated in the 2025 Youth Defender Advocacy Program’s Summer Academy with the Gault Center and Georgetown Law Center. Serena now works to bring racial-justice-centered and developmentally informed advocacy to youth appearing in the earliest stages of adult felony proceedings in Atlanta. She is excited to be a part of the 2025 Ambassadors for Racial Justice Cohort.
“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe.” – James Baldwin.
Matthew Swiontek is an Assistant Public Defender in the Juvenile Division of the Hennepin County Public Defender’s Office in Minneapolis, MN. He Graduated from Purdue University with a B.S. in Economics in 2012 and from the University of St. Thomas with a J.D. in 2015. Matthew clerked for trial court judges in Minnesota and Michigan before becoming a public defender in 2019. Matthew returned to Minneapolis in 2020 and has been representing youth since 2024. During law school, he had a special interest in representing youth and has enthusiastically made the transition. He currently represents youth in delinquency cases and in child protection matters.
Matthew is also an avid movie buff and runner. He sits on the board of directors for the Minneapolis-based non-profit, My in My Shoes, and co-hosts a monthly run crew, Threebird.
“I feel that if we don’t take seriously the ways in which racism is embedded in structures of institutions, if we assume that there must be an identifiable racist who is the perpetrator, then we won’t ever succeed in eradicating racism.” – Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
Charles White is an attorney admitted to practice in Indiana State and Federal Courts with more than two decades of experience in youth defense, civil rights, and community advocacy. He currently serves as a Conflict Attorney with the Marion County Juvenile Public Defender Agency, where he provides legal representation to youth facing delinquency charges. Since founding the Law Office of Charles White in 2004, he has also provided civil litigation, business consultation, and general legal counsel to clients across Indiana.
Earlier in his career, Mr. White served as a Civil Rights Specialist with the Indiana Civil Rights Commission, investigating and litigating discrimination claims. His legal foundation includes work as a bailiff, law clerk, and public defender in the drug and domestic violence divisions.
Beyond the courtroom, Charles has dedicated over 40 years as a preacher and community activist. He has led grassroots racial justice efforts, chaired nonprofit boards, and mentored young men through faith-based and civic programs. A graduate of the Indiana University School of Law, he also holds an M.B.A. and B.S. from Indiana State University. Driven by both faith and justice, Charles views his life’s work as a mission to defend, uplift, and empower youth and families affected by systemic inequities.
“Racial justice is not only a legal pursuit—it is a moral calling. It demands that we see every child, every family, and every community not through the lens of their struggle, but through the promise of their potential.” – Charles White