Meet Our Team

Shakaboona Marshall

Founder & Executive Director

Shakaboona is a criminal justice reform activist and movement architect whose work sits at the intersection of grassroots organizing and electoral power. A native of West Philadelphia and a justice-impacted individual, he’s transformed personal experience into public leadership—founding the Human Rights Coalition and co-founding the Coalition to Abolish Death by Incarceration. His early organizing laid the groundwork for Pennsylvania’s modern anti-mass incarceration movement, launching citywide rallies, town halls, human rights parades, and The Movement magazine to center incarcerated voices in political discourse.

He’s been tapped to run the Human Rights Coalition (HRC) as its executive director where leads various actions for formerly incarcerated individuals, notably his “Second Chance” annual banquet where exemplary returning citizens are honored and given awards for their work and impact.

Shakaboona is not just rewriting the rules of engagement for justice-impacted communities, he’s building movements, shaping outcomes, securing power for progressive change.

Marie-Louise Mendy

Co-Founder & Interim Finance Director

Marie-Louise is strategic finance and operations senior executive. She is the founder of Purple Stories, an entertainment finance and management consulting company where she provides fractional CFO and COO services to small businesses. She’s also a partner at Passbook, a Venture Capital firm.
Prior to founding Purple Stories and joining Passbook, she served as Vice President & Relationship Manager within CIT Bank’s Entertainment Finance group, where she helped structure, arranged, and underwrote over $750MM in debt financing. Prior to joining CIT, she was Senior Corporate Finance Analyst for 21st Century Fox serving the board of the entertainment conglomerate. Before Fox, Ms. Mendy was Director of Finance and Operations at IM Global running the company’s distribution and financing operations.
She’s a at risk-youth mentor and regularly holds film mentoring programs to paroled Philadelphia teenagers enrolled in diversion programs.
Ms. Mendy received an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth Business School.