Christina Oliver

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Christina joined the CFSY team in April 2020 and currently serves as Senior Development Manager, Major Gifts. In her role, Christina stewards relationships with CFSY’s donor base and works in close collaboration with the CFSY team to engage our community through events.

During her time as a student at Duke University, Christina studied Public Policy, where she focused her studies on criminal legal reform and education. After graduation, she moved to DC and began working in education at EAB, where she cultivated partnerships with regional colleges to promote student success. She’s thrilled to now be a part of the CFSY team, addressing the urgent justice issues that sparked her passion for public policy years ago.

Outside of the office, Christina spends her time reading novels, exploring DC, and spending time with her family in the Philadelphia suburbs.

Preston Shipp

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Preston Shipp joined the CFSY in May 2019 and serves as Associate Policy Director. In this role, Preston provide strategic guidance, support, and leadership to states that are working to eliminate life without parole and other extreme sentences for children. He works directly with state-level advocates and legislators.

For several years, Preston served as an appellate prosecutor in the Tennessee Attorney General’s office. While serving as a volunteer and teaching college classes in Tennessee prisons, he became good friends with many people who were incarcerated, one of whom he had actually prosecuted. These relationships caused Preston to wake up to the many injustices that are present in the American system of mass incarceration. Unable to reconcile this conflict, Preston left his career as a prosecutor in 2008. Since then, he has taught in universities and churches, lectured at conferences, and written about the urgent needs for criminal justice reform, a shift in how we regard imprisoned people, and a new vision of justice that seeks healing, transformation, and reconciliation. Preston lives in Nashville with his wife Sherisse and their three children, Lila Joy, Ruby Faith, and Levi.

Kempis 'Ghani' Songster

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Kempis Songster, also known as Ghani, joined the CFSY in March 2024 as CFSY’s first Transformative Healing & Restorative Justice Manager. In this role, he is helping CFSY to advance transformative and healing justice models across the nation. He is a founding member of Right to Redemption, the Redemption Project, and the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI), as well as a co-founder and director of Ubuntu Philadelphia. Since his release in 2017 after thirty years in prison – starting when he was 15 years old – Ghani has emerged as an outspoken voice and visionary in Philadelphia’s movement to end mass human caging and to create transformative and restorative responses to harm and violence. During his first three years out, he worked as the Healing Justice Organizer for the Amistad Law Project (ALP), during which time he co-created and hosted ALP’s “Move It Forward” podcast. Ghani spent another three years at the Youth Art & Self-empowerment Project (YASP) as leader of Philadelphia’s first Restorative Justice Diversion program for youth called Healing Futures.

Rebecca Turner

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Rebecca Turner joined the CFSY team in July 2016. Rebecca tracks the results of resentencings taking place around the country as a result of the Supreme Court decision in Montgomery v. Louisiana. She also coordinates pro bono representation and serves as a resource for attorneys litigating Miller and Montgomery issues.

Studying social sciences as an undergrad, Rebecca focused on structural inequality and its causes and manifestations. Wanting to continue that work as applied to the criminal justice system, she went to law school, where she spent her summers working with organizations that represent death row clients.

After law school, Rebecca worked at the Prisoners’ Project of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, where she advocated for the humane treatment of prisoners in federal and state prisons. In this role, she worked on litigation and advocacy to ensure proper access to medical and mental health care, establish policies that are Americans with Disabilities Act compliant, and improve conditions of confinement. She later worked at the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault, where she worked to implement Prison Rape Elimination Act policies and coordinate rape crisis center services for Maryland prisoners.

Outside of the office, Rebecca spends much of her free time with her nose in a book. She also enjoys trying out new recipes and taking naps.