Who We Are
The Legal Empowerment & Advocacy Hub (L.E.A.H) was established in 2019 in Gainesville, Florida as Florida's first Participatory Defense Hub and the organizational home of the Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative (JLI).
OUR STORY
L.E.A.H was founded by Jhody Polk, a formerly incarcerated Jailhouse lawyer, community paralegal, and peacebuilder. L.E.A.H was created from the belief that communities most impacted by incarceration and systemic injustice should have the knowledge, power, relationships, and leadership necessary to understand, navigate, use, and transform the systems that shape their lives.
Today, L.E.A.H is a neighborhood-rooted legal empowerment organization fiscally sponsored by Mockingbird Incubator and grounded in Sustainable Development Goal 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions. L.E.A.H uses legal empowerment as a proactive tool of abolition to disrupt cycles of incarceration and build stronger justice ecosystems rooted in community, practitioners, and institutions.
Jhody Polk is a formerly incarcerated jailhouse lawyer, community paralegal, peacebuilder, and the founder of L.E.A.Hand the Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative (JLI). Her work is rooted in the conviction that those closest to the harm are best positioned to lead the change.
She is a 2025 David Prize winner, a Global Freedom Consultant with Incarceration Nations Network, a 2018 Soros Justice Fellow, a 2020 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Legacy Award recipient, and the 2019 Peacebuilder of the Year. She is a nationally recognized leader in legal empowerment, peacebuilding, and community justice.
OUR FOUNDER
WHAT WE BELIEVE
The Legal Empowerment & Advocacy Hub (L.E.A.H ) equips communities impacted by incarceration and systemic injustice with the knowledge, tools, and relationships to navigate and transform systems through legal empowerment and peacebuilding.
our mission
L.E.A.H envisions a world where communities most impacted by systemic injustice have the power, knowledge, and collective agency to shape justice, build peace, and transform their futures. Guided by Sustainable Development Goal 16, we seek to create peaceful, just, and inclusive societies with strong and accountable institutions where every person can access, use, and shape the law.
our vision
The L.E.A.H Power Model
At the center of L.E.A.H's work is the L.E.A.H Power Model, a conceptual framework that integrates the Social Ecological Model with the Iceberg Model to explore how transformation happens from the inside out.
The model recognizes that systems are shaped not only by laws, policies, and institutions, but also by deeper forces including identity, relationships, beliefs, values, dignity, and human connection.
L.E.A.H believes that lasting systems change begins with people, their sense of self, agency, relationships, and ability to make values-aligned choices in relationship with others. At the center of this model is what we call the "Choice Point": the human capacity to choose transformation even within harmful systems.
Approach legal empowerment and peacebuilding
Develop community leadership
Facilitate participatory learning spaces
Strengthen relationships across communities and institutions
Build pathways for collective systems transformation
The L.E.A.H Power Model
guides how we:
Meaningful systems change requires both external legal empowerment and internal transformation. The Internal Legal Empowerment Framework is how L.E.A.H puts that belief into practice. Learn More About the Framework»
Our Team
The people who make up L.E.A.H are not observers of this work. They are part of it. Our team brings together formerly incarcerated advocates, legal practitioners, community organizers, and peacebuilders who have navigated these systems firsthand and chosen to transform them.
Jhody Polk
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Jhody Polk is the founder of the Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative (JLI) and CEO of A Light In The Valley, LLC. She is the Pathways to Research and Advocacy Fellow at the Fortune Society and Center for Justice Innovation, and is the creator of the Legal Empowerment & Advocacy Hub (LEAH), an online space dedicated to people Knowing the Law. She is the recipient of the 2019 Peacebuilder of the Year Award, the 2020 Dr. Martin Luther King’s Jr. Legacy award and named a Soros Justice Fellow in 2018. She currently serves on the board of Namati.
Jhody is known for her work as a central Florida Organizer on Amendment 4, a campaign to restore voting rights to over 1.5 million Floridians with felony convictions. She is the formal Director of Community Justice at the River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding and served as the Director of the Alachua County Reentry Coalition 2017-2020. Jhody is a rising Tarot Reader, Astrologer, and Energy Healer. She unapologetically lives for the liberation of Black People, Power, Peace , Human Rights, Participatory Action Research (PAR), Legal Empowerment, Community Peacebuilding and Justice For All.
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Tyler Walton is the Deputy Director at the Robert and Helen Bernstein Institute for Human Rights at NYU School of Law. He joined the Bernstein Institute as the inaugural Tuttleman Legal Empowerment Fellow. Tyler works on legal empowerment, researching and co-developing strategies with affected community members to access and exercise their rights and shift power paradigms back towards communities and individuals. He serves as the managing attorney for the Jailhouse Lawyer Initiative and a supervising attorney with the Global Justice Clinic. Prior to joining the Bernstein Institute, Tyler was a fellow at the Southern Africa Litigation Centre where he led the program on freedom of expression, working to combat closing civic spaces in southern Africa and address new human rights issues caused by the rise of the Internet and digital technologies. He also served two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi developing participatory community health programs. Tyler received his BA from the University of Missouri and his JD from NYU School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden-Kern Public Interest scholar.
Tyler Walton
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Darren Breeden is Community Justice Fellow at NYU’s Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative (JLI) located within the Bernstein Institute for Human Rights. Breeden is a graduate of Bard College, received his paralegal certification in 1994, and from Columbia University in 2022. He is a staunch advocate for Legal Empowerment; specifically, the right of former jailhouse lawyers to contribute to oppressed communities by utilizing legal skills in community based justice hubs.
Darren Breeden
margarita pascual
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Coming Soon
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Chinyere Okafor is a Ph.D. candidate in Critical Social/Personality Psychology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Their research explores the intersections of Participatory Action Research (PAR), healing justice, Black madness studies, and the experiences of marginalized genders navigating institutional violence, belonging, and exclusion. A few of her research experiences includes Youth Participatory Research (YPAR) projects with Black youth navigating gendered sexual violence by school campus police, teaching research skills to young people of color to conduct their own study to present to policymakers in New York City, and supporting an intergenerational racial healing, truth, and reconciliation commission in Texas. As an advisor between JLI and the Smith College School for Social Work’s Community-Based Anti-Racism Experience (CBARE) program, Chinyere brings social work students into critical conversations and support to address the needs and requests of jailhouse lawyers. Additionally, Chinyere co-leads the JLI’s Feminist Circles and PAR work in efforts to further inclusive, justice-driven initiatives that center justice-impacted voices. With a focus on education, healing and social justice, Chinyere’s work is dedicated to dismantling systems of oppression and fostering spaces of care and belonging for historically excluded communities.
Chinyere Oakafor
Building New Legal Ecosystems
Justice and systems transformation are collective work. Through legal empowerment, peacebuilding, and participatory action, L.E.A.H brings together communities, practitioners, and institutions to build stronger relationships, shared language, and more accountable systems. We invest in isolated communities, jailhouse lawyers, community paralegals, and institutional partners together, because lasting change requires all of us learning alongside one another.