BOARD MEMBERS
Jimmy “Rome” Ballard
Toni Battle
Toni is a native San Franciscan, is the founder of The Legacy Project, which documents the legacy of lynchings in the United States and brings healing and reconciliation to those whose ancestry is directly impacted by it, and is a leader of Coming to the Table, a national organization working with descendants of slaves and of slave owners around racial recognition issues. She has a passion for supporting incarcerated young women and in healing ancestral trauma.
Conly Basham
Conly is an artist and healing practitioner. From performing and teaching in New York City, to moving to the Bay Area for her Masters in Counseling Psychology and Expressive Arts Therapy, Conly's life work centers around the power of creative expression in individual and communal healing. She facilitates restorative justice circles in the Bay Area with The Ahimsa Collective, as well as with her husband, daniel j. self at 214 Therapeia. Conly is currently working towards a Ph.D. in Expressive Arts, where her personal scholarship explores the intersections of arts-based ritual and restorative practices towards intergenerational healing, the acknowledgment of power and privilege, and peacebuilding.
Dr. John Brown Childs
John is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was born on December 2nd, 1942, in a public housing project in the Roxbury section of Boston. In 1963, he organized a group of students from the University of Massachusetts, going to the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” where MLK delivered his famous “I Have a Dream speech.” In 1965, he took part in the Civil Rights Movement in Montgomery, Alabama, as a member of “Friends of SNCC,” the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee.
As a volunteer with the “Prison Education Project” of the community organization Barrios Unidos, he has spent the past nineteen years doing volunteer teaching and speaking on peacemaking and “transcommunal cooperation” in Soledad Correctional Training Facility, where he works with the multi-ethnic “Cemanahuac One-World Cultural Group” of incarcerated men.
He works with John R. Lewis College in coordinating a combined UCSC/Soledad CTF “Transcommunal Peacemaking and Cooperation” class (Spring quarter) in which University students participate inside the prison with incarcerated men, who are also students taking the course. He is the author of numerous works, including the book Transcommunality, from the Politics of Conversion to the Ethics of Respect. This book draws on the Indigenous Haudenosaunee Great League of Peace protocols to highlight ways in which people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives can, with mutual respect, work together and learn from one another while holding on to their own cultural and personal foundations. He is also the author of the article “Peace Teachers In and From Soledad Prison.”
In 1997, he was awarded the Fulbright Foundation's “Thomas Jefferson Chair of Distinguished Teaching,” which he held in the Netherlands at the University of Utrecht. In 2019 he received the University of California Social Science Division's Distinguished Emeriti Faculty” award. In 2022, he earned the University of California's system-wide highest award for emeriti faculty, “The Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award.”
Of African-Madagascan and Native American descent, he is, through his mother's side of the family, an enrolled member of the “Massachuset (Big Hills) Indigenous Tribe at Ponkapoag (Sweet Water Pond)," whose ancestral lands include Boston, Massachusetts, where he was born.
Theresa Pualei Guy
After spending much of her adult life enhancing her left brain capabilities, Theresa rather illogically leaned right into listening to her intuitive heart. Educated as an attorney she is grateful for the opportunity to continue to teach Kingian Nonviolence Conflict Reconciliation with the East Point Peace Academy as a founding member. Often perceived by others as a “culturally ambiguous” person, Theresa has a lifelong interest in our multicultural reality and the resulting social justice imperative.
Teresa resigned from EPPA board of Directors in October 2023, but remains a friend of the Board and valued advisor.
OUR TRAINERS
We have the honor of working with dozens of talented trainers in our community to run and sustain our programs. Our training team ranges from incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people to activists and educators and everything in between. We hope you can attend some of our workshops to meet our teams!
