Lewis Webb is the Healing and Transformative Justice coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee in New York. After previously working for the District Attorney in Brooklyn, Lewis currently "focuses his work on decreasing New York’s prison population by mitigating paths to incarceration and increasing opportunities for release through sentencing and parole reform." Hear his story, first hand, below.

"I think right now, the most important part of me is that I’m a parent. And specifically a parent of three young men of color, who for a variety of reasons, are living the issues that I work around. And work becomes a lot easier when there is a personal reason to do it. So I think most important for me is that I get to work for my children, literally and figuratively. When I think about myself, that's what I think about. The opportunity to do what I do for them. Every day I go to work with one goal and that is to decrease the likelihood that one of my children will go to prison. That’s it. I wake up-- how am I going to further that cause today? And I go home and I judge whether or not I was successful."

"The real effort towards justice is going to require hearing from everyone and honoring everyone's perspective and looking for that commonality in your perspective that we can all get behind. Because we all want to be safe, right? We all want fairness, we all want those things-- it may not look the same, we may not articulate it the same. But, because of my background I’m able, often, to help find that commonality from communities that might have different perspectives"