In honor of Women's History Month, Jia Johnson will be joining us as keynote speaker for our region meeting. We will also have Rev. Jonathan Reynold from Salem Baptist Church to talk more about the Salem Hope Nights collaboration with Live Free and other great organizations looking to bring enrichment and safe spaces for youth this summer.

Jia Johnson is a community healer at the intersection of creative education, liberative praxis, community building, spiritual writing and abolition. Her commitments to dismantling oppressive systems and imagining into existence new systems of flourishing are influenced by her lived experience, community of belonging and progressive faith beliefs.

Jia designed and established the Solidarity Building Initiative for Liberative Carceral Education at McCormick Theological Seminary (MTS), and currently serves as its director. As director, she co-creates learning communities, programs, curricula and collaborations that tend to the whole of incarcerated learners at the Cook County Jail and their communities of belonging.

Rev. Jonathan Reynolds, 33 years old, was born, raised, and called to the city of Chicago. He is the Co-founder of Urban Reformers, a social justice and community organizing non-profit organization with a mission to plant 77 gospel-centered neighbors in the Chicagoland area. He has been preaching since the early age of 14 years, and has over a decade of professional pastoral experience. He is passionate about building sustainable ministry models in local urban contexts.

He currently serves humbly at the Salem Baptist Church of Chicago, loves to bicycle, and resides on the Near West neighborhood of Chicago.