Jessica Nowlan

Jessica is president of Reimagine Freedom Center, co-founder of the Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition and a social entrepreneur. Jessica previously served as executive director of Young Women’s Freedom Center, where she created the Freedom Research Institute and launched Freedom 2030, a 10-year strategy to end the incarceration and criminalization of women, young women, and trans people of all genders in California. Jessica is driven by her own experiences navigating the juvenile justice system as a young person and poverty, houselessness and intimate partner violence as a single mother. While at Mesa Refuge, she worked on strategic plans for ReImagine Freedom and the Sister Warriors Freedom Charter. Find out more about Jessica on her LinkedIn page.

As a featured 2024 spring Writer-on-the-Edge, Jessica said:

“Rarely are folks that have been incarcerated positioned as thought leaders, authors, or narrative shifters. My life’s work and the work I did at Mesa is about creating the structures and systems that will allow for the power and brilliance of poor people to be released into the world in all sectors of our society—to reshape it.“