Equal Justice USA was a national organization that worked to transform the justice system by promoting responses to violence that break cycles of trauma. EJUSA worked at the intersection of criminal justice, public health, and racial justice to elevate healing over retribution, meet the needs of survivors, advance racial equity, and build community safety.
This is the history of EJUSA.
Seeds of Transformation
In 1990, the members of a quirky social justice collective called the Quixote Center gathered in the Maryland suburbs to consider a new campaign. Jane Henderson, who had been working on the Center’s Nicaragua program, made the case for taking on the criminal justice system. Mass incarceration was beginning to soar, and approval for the death penalty was at an all-time high. All of it was anchored in racism and socio-economic inequality.
Jane founded the project Equal Justice USA.
Chessmaster Strategy
In its early years, EJUSA raised public awareness of police brutality, racism, and the surging use of the death penalty. Those issues came together in EJUSA’s advocacy for Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose death penalty sentence became a nationwide story.
In 1997, EJUSA launched the Moratorium Now! Campaign after the American Bar Association adopted a resolution calling for a moratorium until a host of issues could be addressed. EJUSA’s campaign became a turning point for death penalty work. Local municipalities, states, and many national organizations issued countless resolutions. The campaign shifted the focus on state strategy, and EJUSA built out its accompaniment model, developing relationships with more than 30 state partners nationwide while also opening its first field office in New Jersey, led by Celeste Fitzgerald.
Next Level
Then, in 2000, EJUSA hired Shari Silberstein. In addition to a fierce work ethic and desire to combat injustice, Shari brought curiosity and creativity in thinking about strategy and how best to achieve change.
Jane, Shari, and eventually Sarah Craft built on Moratorium Now! and the work evolved into several state-led campaigns to end the death penalty. In doing so, they developed a blueprint for how to move death penalty repeal legislation through a legislature and to a governor’s desk. The process encompassed hundreds of small victories, with plenty of setbacks, over long periods of time. EJUSA opened several field offices, including the Northwest (by Sarah), the Midwest (Eunice Ravenna) and Florida (Christine Henderson).
In 2006, New York made history by becoming the first state since the Supreme Court had re-established the death penalty as constitutional, in 1976, to abolish its law. New Jersey followed the next year, and Maryland, EJUSA’s origin state, struck in 2013. Other huge wins, driven by EJUSA in partnership with state forces, include Illinois (2011), Connecticut (2012), New Hampshire (2019), and Colorado (2020).
After the victory in NY, there was extraordinary excitement about the strategy and the possibility of more repeals. Funders wanted to invest in EJUSA and grow the work into other states.
The best way to grow would be as an independent organization. So in 2007, EJUSA spun off from the Quixote Center. Jane took a new position with a Maryland-based nonprofit but became an EJUSA board member, and Shari became the founder of EJUSA as an independent organization.
Independence allowed EJUSA to grow in different ways. The work to abolish the death penalty would continue: EJUSA, with new key staff members Mona Cadena and Colleen Cunningham, played a leading role in all 11 successful repeals of this era and contributed to the ongoing campaign efforts in most of the states with active death penalty statutes.
A key aspect of the developing strategy focused on “bridging divides.” EJUSA launched two successful projects as part of the work: Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty and the EJUSA Evangelical Network. Both established key relationships and partners with people and groups not expected to support death penalty repeal, helping to establish the growing disapproval of capital punishment.
But Shari and the team, in meeting and working with countless survivors of violence, especially those from Black communities whose needs were often ignored, recognized the consistent presence of unhealed trauma in these families and communities.
This evolving understanding became the foundation of a new vision for the organization. And it rested on the conviction that it wasn’t enough to rely on a reform strategy. In other words, we couldn’t just dismantle the harmful system—we had to build something new in its place.
A New Vision for Justice
Shari's own words best express where EJUSA would go:
I began to see that there was a silent majority of crime survivors in communities of color who rarely received the empathy afforded white victims and who were more often blamed for their victimization (much like women across race are blamed for being sexually assaulted). This silent majority had been left out of the mainstream victims rights movement, which was relatively white. A new paradigm was coming together — a vision of justice centered on healing that would break cycles of trauma for everyone impacted.
This healing-centered work began to take shape in exciting ways. Beginning around 2010, Shari co-led a collective space called the New Paradigm Group, which met for three years and held a critical convening that notably ensured that survivors of color had prominent seats at the table.
Recognizing that white people were dominating victims' support spaces and resources, EJUSA launched its VOCA (Victims of Crime Act) Project. Through that work, we helped 12 grassroots organizations in communities of color secure more than $4 million to fund victims' compensation and support.
Around this same time, EJUSA began to develop a program that would put a focus on the trauma that comes from police interactions and violence. They piloted the program in Newark, NJ, a majority Black city that had struggled with soaring rates of violence for years but also had a new mayor, Ras Baraka, who recognized the role trauma played in his community and expressed openness to change.
The program ultimately took on the name Trauma to Trust. The core of it was a two-day workshop that brought community members and police officers together to explore and understand trauma, how it affects us, and how police officers could use their understanding to engage differently with the community.
Early results showed a reduction in police use of force. Since its inception, more than 1,000 community members and police officers have gone through the program, including a second iteration in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
The connection to Baton Rouge came about through a federally funded program called Collective Healing. We worked with five cities through the program and it became a foundation for supporting community organizations and shaping policy work, which ultimately fit within our community-based public safety initiatives. Enormous legislative and policy wins followed, including a California tax on ammunition that would invest in community violence intervention work and New Jersey funding that created crisis response infrastructure that will reduce police violence.
The leaders of grassroots organizations building public safety were always those who had experienced trauma and violence themselves. They had vital stories to tell in addition to the expertise they had in building solutions to violence. And they needed support! So EJUSA began to meet that need, forming the Trauma and Healing Network. Elevating their voices was critical. So too was offering capacity and technical assistance (on grant applications, for example). That ultimately became a core initiative for EJUSA, known as Learning and Practice.
All of these initiatives as well as our roles in the California Violence Intervention and Prevention program and the New Jersey Violence Intervention and Prevention program and other work became the foundation of a new model: the community-based public safety ecosystem.
Turning Point
Shari and the team spent more than a decade reinventing EJUSA as an organization that redefined justice — away from the understanding that justice is punishment and toward a new ideal that justice can and should deliver healing, safety, and accountability that repairs everyone. With the vision crystallizing, Shari wanted to make one final transformative change.
She had been thinking for some time that an organization serving the people and communities most harmed by violence and mass incarceration should be led by such a person. She and the management team launched a search for a new executive director.
In 2021, Jamila Hodge became the EJUSA's second ED. As a former federal prosecutor, Jami had seen up close the harm that the system inflicted. And she and her family were survivors of violence, after Jami's father suffered brain injuries during a robbery attack. She had been working to reform the prosecutorial process prior to EJUSA, but she too believed that a new vision was possible. She found it at EJUSA.
She made an immediate impact, garnering support for The Future of Public Safety, a groundbreaking report documenting the community-based public safety ecosystem that had matured in Newark.
That initiative highlighted the great need for establishing our own research and evaluation practice, which proved vital to developing our annual workplans and creating accountability around the effectiveness of our work.
From its earliest inception, our vision for a reimagined justice included an approach to violence that didn't involve policing, prosecutions, or prison. But we didn't have that strand of work in our portfolio. That changed in 2023, when the Restorative Justice Project became part of EJUSA. At the time, the Project supported 10 communities across the country in building and sustaining their restorative justice programs.
Around that time, our development team secured a new type of federal funding that would support our growing work in Louisiana to prevent violence as well as the new restorative justice project, a healthy effort to diversify our funding.
The Movement Continues
There was never any doubt that November 6, 2024 was going to be a consequential day, depending on who got elected president. The aftershocks have continued to shake our world.
EJUSA had already seen a shift in the funding landscape prior to the election. Foundations and corporations, which were quick to pour money into racial justice after the murder of George Floyd, had grown much more cautious. Some had pivoted to different issue areas. The landscape was weakening.
In March 2025, EJUSA made the painful decision to end its Death Penalty Program and Trauma to Trust, while spinning off Conservatives Concerned. Leadership felt the need to sharpen our focus on transformation to improve our chances for long term sustainability.
Weeks after losing eight valued teammates, the Trump administration illegally revoked more than $800 million in grants to hundreds of organizations preventing violence throughout the nation. EJUSA lost more than $3 million, a substantial portion of our budget. A number of our community partners also suffered because of our loss.
This was a ruthless attack on life-saving work — and on public safety.
After dozens of meetings and so many hours of analysis and deliberations, the leadership of this organization, on our staff and the board, came to the difficult decision to wind down EJUSA's operations with the same dignity and grace with which we have carried out this mission for more than three decades.
In September 2025, EJUSA’s Board of Directors decided, after even more assessment and reflection, to dissolve the organization’s legal corporation. The work ended too soon; communities nationwide will always need healing-centered public safety solutions. With that in mind, the board is committed to ensuring that as much of our programmatic work as possible will endure in allied organizations. To that end, the board will allocate our residual resources to organizations that share EJUSA’s mission so they continue to build safety through healing and community.
We urge you to continue on. We must all carry forward our vision and build safety — in our communities and those of our neighbors.
