The Team

Lead Consultant

Katie is the Lead Consultant at Local Solutions Support Center (LSSC). During her tenure at LSSC, Katie has focused on deepening cross-movement collaboration by building and supporting state campaigns and coalitions to defend against state interference in local policy-making and advance home rule reform. As Lead Consultant, Katie facilitates communication, collaboration, and engagement with LSSC’s network and partners and coordinates the day-to-day operation of LSSC.

Katie brings nearly twenty years of experience with social justice and political work to LSSC, highlights from which include securing groundbreaking legal protections for same-sex couples and transgender individuals in her home state of Wisconsin, leading a national campaign for inclusive nondiscrimination policies, and successfully fundraising for multi-million dollar grassroots campaigns and political candidates. In 2015, Katie launched her consulting practice, Katie B. Strategies, LLC, through which she facilitates aligning around a shared mission, engaging and developing leaders, and delivering real successes to the communities her clients serve, bringing these groups of people together to make the world more fair, equal, and inclusive.

Development and Administrative Consultant

As LSSC’s Administrative and Development Consultant, Theo brings his experience in operations, administration, development, event management, and networking to the organization. He provides logistical, strategic, organizational, and administrative support, helping to connect LSSC and its many affiliates, as well as assisting in the management of LSSC’s events and webinars.

His education at Wake Forest University was focused on communications and sociology, and he is an outspoken activist for diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice.

Michigan State Campaign Consultant

Tracey Corder, Is a Senior Strategy & Power Building Consultant with Synergy Power Consulting. Tracey is an activist, organizer, strategist, communicator, facilitator, and trainer. In her 15 years of professional experience, she has run electoral, issue, and cultural shifting campaigns. Most recently Tracey served as the Campaign Director for Action Center on Race and the Economy’s (ACRE) Policing, Incarceration, and Tech work. 

Before ACRE, Tracey worked at the Center for Popular Democracy, where she supported Black-led organizations in developing justice transformation campaigns through facilitation, visioning, and campaign planning. In addition, Tracey leveraged direct action and mass mobilization as a tactic to advocate for progressive legislation on Housing, economic justice, immigration, voting rights, climate, and policing. 

Notably, Tracey was a leader in the on-the-ground movement against the nomination and confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, which helped galvanize young people and working-class women to historic levels of voter participation and resulted in the most diverse Congress ever elected. 

State Campaign Consultant

Korey T. Johnson, Esq. serves as a policy strategist and organizer for country-wide legislative campaigns that seek to eliminate economic barriers for individuals with criminal records. As an owner of her own consultant company, CK Strategies & Solutions, Korey's focus is on empowering advocates and developing technical support to sustain multi-state campaigns. Prior to joining the CSG, as a Senior Policy Analyst at the CSG Justice Center, Korey led a multi-state occupational licensure campaign that led to the passage of fair chance licensing policies in over 20 states for reentering citizens. Further, as a Senior Policy Research Analyst at the Job Opportunities Task Force, Korey’s advocacy resulted in the passage of legislation that increased educational opportunities for incarcerated individuals in the State of Maryland. She also served as an Attorney Advisor for the U.S. Department of Justice and a legislative aid in the State of Maryland General Assembly. She received her BS in political science from Towson University, JD from Howard University, and is currently a doctoral student at Morgan State University.

Lead

Dan Rafter serves as the Communications Team Lead for LSSC. Dan has 15+ years of experience working with coalitions, campaigns, and nonprofits to identify winning messages, develop targeted and effective earned media strategies, and drive compelling narratives in the media. At LSSC, Dan works with state partners and advocates to develop communication strategies that highlight the harms of abusive preemption. 

Dan’s background spans multiple issue spaces –including LGBTQ equality, justice reform, health care, and higher education. Dan has led the communications team at Freedom for All Americans, the national campaign dedicated to winning LGBTQ nondiscrimination. He’s also worked as a Communications Director on Capitol Hill, and for nonprofits including the Human Rights Campaign.

M+R

Rosa Colman is an Account Supervisor at M+R and a member of the LSSC Communications Team. In her work with LSSC, Rosa helps state coalitions effectively push back against the misuse of preemption legislation and works to spotlight the importance of local control in national media.

Prior to joining M+R, Rosa held communications and operations roles on congressional, statewide, and national political campaigns. She received her B.A. in Political Science and Education from Macalester College.

M+R

Sydney Gafford is a Media Relations Associate at M+R and a member of the LSSC Communications Team. In her work with LSSC, Sydney helps connect the dots of abusive preemption across issues and highlights for reporters the history and the harms of abusive preemption.

Sydney holds a Bachelor’s degree in public relations from Murray State University, with minors in advertising and marketing.

Web & Graphic Design

Adam Polaski is a communications strategist and graphic designer living in Asheville, NC. He has more than a decade of experience working to harness the power of writing, narrative, digital strategy, social media, and graphic design to advance social justice. He provides web design, graphic design, and social media strategy services for the Local Solutions Support Center.

Adam has worked on the digital and communication teams at Freedom to Marry, the successful campaign to win marriage for same-sex couples in the United States; the Campaign for Southern Equality, which works toward legal and lived equality for LGBTQ Southerners; Freedom for All Americans, the national campaign for LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination protections; and The Brigid Alliance, which funds and arranges logistics for people forced to travel long distances for abortion care. He has also supported communications and graphic design efforts for nonprofit organizations including GLSEN, the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, the Southern AIDS Coalition, and the National Center for Transgender Equality, and political candidates.

Legal Team Co-Lead

Brianne Schell, JD, MA, is an attorney with a background in public health and policy. Brianne serves as co-Legal Team Lead with LSSC, where she supports partners' efforts to fight abusive preemption through collaboration and legal technical assistance including legislative tracking and legal research and writing. She has experience supporting state and local governments and advocates seeking to protect public health and advance health equity through policy in areas such as affordable housing, substance use, data collection and privacy, women's health, and more. Brianne earned her B.S. in Public Health, M.A. in Public Policy and Management, and J.D from The Ohio State University.

Legal Team Co-Lead

Leslie Zellers, JD, is an attorney with more than 20 years of experience in public health law and policy for nonprofit and government organizations. Leslie serves as Legal Team Co-Lead with LSSC, where she supports partners' efforts to fight abusive preemption through collaboration and legal technical assistance, including legislative tracking and legal research and writing. In addition to her work to counter abusive preemption, Leslie works to advance public health and wellbeing through legal and policy advocacy in areas such as defending public health authority, tobacco control, cannabis regulation, and disaggregation of public health data. Leslie holds a BA from University of California at Berkeley, and a JD from UC Hastings College of the Law.

Public Rights Project

Michael Adame is an attorney with a background in federal, state, and local regulatory regimes and public policy. In addition to his PRP portfolio, he works alongside the Local Solutions Support Center's legal team and its efforts to support local democracy and combat abusive preemption. Prior to joining PRP, Michael worked on the 2020 campaign to elect President Joe Biden.

Michael graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School and cum laude from Columbia University.

A Better Balance

Jared Make, Vice President of A Better Balance, is proud to partner with the Local Solutions Support Center.

A member of ABB’s staff since 2010, Jared has worked with advocates and coalitions to draft and pass dozens of state and local laws that guarantee paid sick time and paid family and medical leave. In 2014, Jared co-founded ABB’s LGBTQ Rights Project to advocate for the rights of LGBTQ workers, raise awareness about the diversity of family
structures, and enact workplace policies that cover a range of caregiving relationships. Jared also helped to launch ABB’s Defending Local Democracy Project, part of a nationwide effort coordinated by the Local Solutions Support Center, to strengthen, protect, and defend
progressive, local laws.

Jared graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wesleyan University and cum laude from NYU School of Law.

Fordham University School of Law and Urban Law Center

Nestor Davidson joined Fordham in 2011 and was named the Albert A. Walsh Professor of Real Estate, Land Use and Property Law in 2017. Professor Davidson is an expert in property, urban law, and affordable housing law and policy, and is the co-author of the casebook Property Law: Rules, Policies and Practices (7th ed. 2017). Professor Davidson founded and serves as the faculty director of the law school’s Urban Law Center and previously served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

Learn more.

Research Consultant

Benjamin D. Winig, JD, MPA, serves as LSSC’s Research Lead and as a member of the Legal Team. In his roles, he cultivates and coordinates research exploring the impacts of state preemption and provides technical assistance on matters related to local government and public health law. Ben is also the Founder of ThinkForward Strategies, a consulting firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. For over two decades, he has provided legal, policy, and strategic advice and counsel to local governments, community-based organizations, think tanks, and philanthropies. His recent work has focused on dismantling barriers that impede good governance and equitable policymaking. Ben is a skilled facilitator and trainer, and works with individuals and organizations across the country interested in challenging their potential to create positive change. Previously, he served as Vice President of Law & Policy at ChangeLab Solutions and practiced municipal law in California. Ben graduated from the University of Michigan, with distinction, and earned his law degree and master’s in public affairs from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Preeti Chauhan is a professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (CUNY), and a professor of psychology and criminal justice at the Graduate Center at CUNY. She is a co-founder and former director of the Data Collaborative at John Jay College. Her research interests include examining the role of macro-level factors that may create and sustain racial disparities in arrests, incarceration, and victimization. Her work has informed criminal justice policies and reform initiatives in New York City, New York State, and other jurisdictions nationwide. 

Chauhan has received numerous awards, including the Feliks Gross Endowment Award and the Donal EJ McNarma Junior Faculty Award, and was named a Tribeca Disruptor Foundation fellow. She serves on the board of directors of the New York City Criminal Justice Agency and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Law and Justice. She is also on the editorial boards of Law and Human Behavior, Psychology of Violence, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, and Psychological Services.

Chauhan received a BA and BS from the University of Florida and a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Virginia. Her predoctoral clinical internship was completed at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Crystal N. Lewis is a Public Health Law & Policy Analyst for Ohio State University and the Institute for Healing Justice and Equity https://ihje.org/. Crystal graduated in 2019 with a JD/MPH from Saint Louis University and has several years of social justice and legal research experience; specifically legal epidemiology, policy surveillance, and transdisciplinary collaboration. Crystal is currently co- teaching with Professor Ruqaiijah Yearby on Health Equity, Policy, and Advocacy. This class is a collaboration with the CDC’s Public Health Law Program and focused on discrimination in employment, specifically pregnancy discrimination. Other projects include being a co-lead in the national Collaborative for Anti-racism and Equity (CARE) https://herenow.org/ which includes continuing to track responses and declarations of racism as a public health crisis and health and racial equity frameworks on a national level and being a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Grant investigator focused on Housing Enforcement policy in the U.S.

Dr. Nelson is an Associate Professor of Education Policy & Leadership and department chair in the Educational Psychology, Leadership, and Higher Education Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Prior to his current appointment, Dr. Nelson served on the faculty of the University of Memphis (as Program Coordinator) and the University of New Orleans. He has taught and led in charter schools, traditional public schools, and private schools in the New Orleans area. He also served as the first-ever Education Advocate at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s School-to-Prison Pipeline Project in New Orleans, where he worked on charter school law and policy, special education access and equity, and juvenile justice issues. 

Dr. Nelson’s research and teaching interests are at the intersection of education law, education policy, and the politics of education. In particular, his research and teaching consider how education reform laws, policies, and political dynamics advance, impede, or regress efforts at achieving educational equity for Black students, families, and communities in urban settings. He considers himself a Critical Race Theorist. His work has been published in various media including law reviews, education journals, and edited books. Dr. Nelson’s work has been covered in the Washington Post and on national blogs, such as Cloaking Inequity. He maintains active memberships in the American Educational Research Association, the University Council of Educational Administration, the Critical Race Studies in Education Association, the Education Law Association, the Association of Urban Law Scholars, and the Law & Society Association. He fulfills leadership roles in some of these organizations and frequently presents scholarly works and/or professional developments at international and national conferences and research symposia. 

Dr. Nelson is currently serving as a Non-Resident Faculty Fellow at the Fordham University Urban Law Center. He is currently the Division L, Section 2 Chairperson and the Law & Education Special Interest Group Program Chair in the American Educational Research Association. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Research on Leadership Education. He also holds appointments on the editorial boards of prestigious research journals, namely Urban Education and Educational Researcher.

Lori Riverstone is an Associate Professor of Politics and Government at Illinois State University. She graduated with a Masters of Public Administration and a Doctorate in Political Science from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Her teaching centers on subnational politics and policy, environmental policy, and public administration. The current focus of her research includes the intergovernmental arrangement, state preemption, and how, despite their legal subordination in the federal system, localities strive to meet their needs.

Dr. Riverstone has published in various academic journals and is the author of Renegade Cities, Public Policy, and the Dilemmas of Federalism. She is the editor of the Local Power & Politics Review, a project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Her book, Built for the Middle Class, is scheduled for publication in the summer of 2022.

Eva Rosen is an Associate Professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy. She uses ethnography, qualitative, and mixed methods to study poverty, racial inequality, and American housing policy in the urban context. In 2022-2023 she is a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York. 

Rosen received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in Sociology and Social Policy. Her first book, The Voucher Promise, about housing insecurity and housing vouchers was published by Princeton University Press in July 2020, and is the winner of the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Outstanding Book Award from the American Sociological Association and the Paul Davidoff Book Award from the ACSP. She has published papers in journals including the American Sociological Review, City & Community, Social Problems, Housing Policy Debate, The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and The Annual Review of Sociology. Rosen is a member of the Scholar Strategy Network. In 2018 she was recognized as one of APPAM’s outstanding early career scholars and received the 40 for 40 fellowship. She is currently working on a book project with Philip Garboden entitled American Landlord about property owners and the low-end housing market. 

Rosen's work has been funded by: The National Science Foundation, HUD, The Joint Center for Housing Studies, The Furman Center, The Harvard Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy, The Massive Data Institute, The Institute for Research on Poverty, and The Meyer Foundation.

Ruqaiijah Yearby, J.D., M.P.H is the inaugural Kara J. Trott Professor in Law at the Moritz College of Law and a faculty affiliate of the Kirwan Institute at The Ohio State University. She is also Co-founder and a faculty affiliate of the Institute for Healing Justice & Equity and one of the Co-Founders of the Collaborative for Anti-Racism & Equity. 

Professor Yearby has received over $5 million in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health to study structural racism and discrimination in vaccine allocation and from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study the equitable enforcement of housing laws and structural 

racism in the health care system. She was recently awarded the McDonald-Merrill-Ketcham Award and served as a reviewer for the National Institutes of Health as well as the Swiss National Science Foundation. 

In the twenty years that she has been in academia, she has published 33 articles, 8 book chapters, 8 reports, and 17 blogs/editorials/commentaries. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Bioethics, American Journal of Public Health, Emory Law Journal, Health Affairs, and the Oxford Journal of Law and the Biosciences. 

She earned her B.S. in Honors Biology from the University of Michigan, M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. She worked at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as an Assistant Regional Counsel and served as a law clerk for the Honorable Ann Claire Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Home Rule Reform Campaign Consultant

Jennifer Epps-Addison J.D., has spent the last 25 years leading justice-centered campaigns and organizations. Her work is rooted in community organizing, cultivating winning strategies and advancing systems-change campaigns to transform our world and create the conditions where we all have the freedom to thrive.

Jennifer is the Founder and Chief Imagineer at Synergy Power Consulting, a coach-collaborator consulting firm supporting the next generation of social change leaders. Her work has been featured in hundreds of earned media stories, across dozens of platforms, networks, and publications.

Prior to founding Synergy Power Consulting, Jennifer served as the President and Co-Executive Director of the Center for Popular Democracy and CPD Action, a $30+ million dollar national network of grassroots power building organizations operating with more than 100 staff working across 120 cities and 34 states throughout the country.

Jennifer sits on the Boards of Directors for the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, United For Respect, Be A Hero Fund, Re:Power, Step Up Louisiana, the Forge, an online journal dedicated to organizing strategy and practice, and the Action Lab, a movement retreat and leadership development center.

When she’s not working to transform the world, Jennifer writes science fiction and does her best to raise her 13 and 15 year-old kids to be kind and mentally-liberated .