Staff
Ethan Lin
Director of Grassroots Fundraising & Communications
Ethan Lin is a longtime sustainer of SRLP who is committed to challenging systemic and interpersonal violence. He dreams of world in which all of us have equal access to resources that enable us to live out our desires and bring out the best in ourselves.
Juana Paola Peralta
Director of Outreach and Community Engagement
Juana Paola Peralta is a queer fat hard femme Latin@ who dreams of finding new ways of loving, organizing & building each other up in a world that hurts a lot. Juana has been educating and organizing around issues of gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability for over seven years.
Kyle Rapiñan
Director of Survival and Self-Determination
Kyle Rapiñan is a Staff Attorney and Director of the Survival and Self-Determination Project with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Kyle has been working with SRLP since 2014 as a legal intern, volunteer, consultant, legal advocate, and friend. Prior to joining SRLP, this mixed race organizer gained experience working with the community at Legal Aid Society Criminal Defense Practice-Bronx, Peter Cicchino Youth Project of the Urban Justice Center, SRLP, and the Legal Aid Society-Parole Revocation Defense Project. Kyle is a graduate of Northeastern University School of Law with a clinical focus on criminal defense and parole matters. Kyle has experience in queer & trans youth organizing, and building a response collective process. Fully a believer in racial, trans, and economic justice, Kyle dreams of a world that affirms all of our identities, without any hurdles for low income folks, and a world that empowers rather than divides.
Maxwell Scales
Director of Development
Max is a longtime SRLP supporter and volunteer who is committed to trans liberation. Prior to joining the staff, Max did development work at Lambda Legal, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. He spends his free time brewing beer and watching bad movies.
Mik Kinkead
Director of Prisoner Justice Project
Mik Kinkead has been around SRLP volunteering, interning, and serving on the Core Collective since 2008. He is currently a Staff Attorney with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and the Director of SRLP’s Prisoner Justice Project. Previously, Mik was a staff attorney at Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York. He graduated from CUNY Law School where he participated in clinics focusing on the rights of youth in adult prisons and poverty law representation. Mik works in areas of racial and trans justice, LGBTQ youth homelessness, suicide and crisis prevention, and disability justice. Mik dreams of a dance party where we can all have our needs met and enough space to dance.
Rage M. Kidvai
Paul Rapoport Foundation Equal Justice Works Fellow, Immigrant Justice Project
Rage M. Kidvai is an attorney and Paul Rapoport Foundation Equal Justice Works Fellow in the Immigrant Justice Project. Rage received their Bachelor’s degree from Hampshire College, and their J.D. from the City University School of Law, with a clinical focus on criminal defense. A former SRLP intern and collective member, Rage is committed to supporting folks experiencing and working hard to challenge state violence and oppression. Their prior work outside of SRLP has included representing survivors of inter-personal violence on their welfare & immigration cases, family defense work for parents facing allegations of neglect due to their poverty, and criminal defense representation at public defender offices. Rage is thrilled to be able to grow with those involved with SRLP, and hopes to provide support to the amazing legal staff in the SRLP Direct Services Team (DST).
Sasha Alexander
Director of Membership
Sasha Alexander is non binary trans mixed race black/asian facilitator, educator, multi-media artist, healer, and community organizer with close to 20 years experience organizing in social justice movements. From a young age Sasha has been an activist combining art and community organizing at individual, institutional, ideological, and spiritual levels to educate and shift cultural perceptions about age, race, sexuality, gender, and power. In 2000 as a youth organizer Sasha founded the first Gay-Straight Alliance in their public high school and went onto to work with GLSEN as National Day of Silence Student Organizing Team New Jersey State Representative, LGBTQA Student of Color Organizing Leader, and Trainer of Trainers facilitating anti-oppresion and anti-violence workshops. Sasha is 2008 a graduate of Hampshire College where she received a Community Partnership for Social Change grant and studied transformative justice, community organizing, multi-media video installation, and ethnography. Throughout college and afterwards Sasha worked with lgbt youth, low-income youth, and youth of color as a case manager, employment specialist, program coordinator, and media educator in communities everywhere from Greenfield Massachusetts to Rikers Island NYC for organizations like Community Action Youth Program and Tribecca Film Institute, respectively. In 2013 after teaching at the intersections of youth media and social justice for over a decade, and called to action by the murder of 21 year old Islan Nettles, Sasha Founded and launched Black Trans Media committed to addressing the intersections of racism and transphobia by shifting and reframing the value and worth of black trans lives #blacktranseverything. Sasha is the Membership Director at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) and works to strengthen the leadership of TGNCI people specifically low income, formerly incarcerated people, immigrants, and trans people of color. Sasha is married to the most incredible trans warrior Olympia Perez and loves time on the land, decolonizing everything, abolition, their cat mumia shakur, and movement history. Sasha uses the pronouns he/she/they and insists that you mix it up.
Stefanie Rivera
Director of Client Services
Stefanie Rivera is a long time member, consultant and former Prisoner Rights intern, and now SRLP's Director of Client Services. Stefanie helped found the Prisoner Justice Project at SRLP and, as one of SRLP's original members, has played a pivotal role in SRLP's development.
Some of our Core Collective members
Dean Spade
Dean Spade is a member of SRLP's Fundraising and Finance Team. He is a professor at Seattle University School of Law. From 2002 to 2006 he was a staff attorney at SRLP. He wrote a book about trans politics and law influenced by his experiences working with SRLP, called Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law.
Gabriel Arkles
Gabriel Arkles lives in Boston, where he teaches in the Legal Skills in Social Context program at Northeastern University School of Law. He has been an SRLP collective member since 2004, and worked on SRLP's staff as an attorney from 2004 to 2010. He is deeply honored to be a part of SRLP's work, and wants to keep working with people at SRLP and everywhere for trans liberation, prison abolition, racial justice, economic justice, disability justice, and reproductive justice until we win! Gabriel's articles, which are mostly about gender, race, and the prison industrial complex, have appeared in a number of law reviews and anthologies. Gabriel was on the board of the Lorena Borjas Community Fund, an organization that provides bail and bond support to criminalized LGBT immigrants in New York, and is just starting to get involved with other organizations like Black and Pink and Queer Muslims of Boston. In his free time, Gabriel cuddles his cats, reads science fiction, and plays role-playing games.
