United Black Family Scholarship Foundation

Taos Washington serves as the Program and Policy Director for the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation. Taos started as the Survey & Research Coordinator before switching to the Program and Policy Coordinator. Taos then moved up the ranks and was promoted to the Program and Policy Director position for the United Black Family Scholarship Foundations. Taos recently graduated from the University of Colorado Denver in the Spring of 2024 earning his Master’s in Public Administration with a specialization in Public Policy Analysis/Program Evaluation. Taos is excited to continue his Journey in his new role with the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation.

Cheyenne recently graduated from California State University Los Angeles with a Bachelors degree in Political Science. She has plans to go to graduate school and get her Masters degree in Political Science and then go to Law School. Cheyenne aims to focus on improving education in disadvantaged communities to transform the norm of school to prison pipeline. Her goal is to encourage lawmakers to implement stronger school systems inside marginalized and socially excluded communities that incorporate work-based programs that encourage students to stay in school as well as promote increased skill sets to prepare students for life after school. Cheyenne previously served as our R.E.B.U.I.L.D. Volunteer and Services Coordinator.

James Ewing is project management director with proven technical abilities and an eye for design. He realized his passion for art late in life when he picked up a charcoal pencil and started drawing his first piece. He eventually produced a gallery exhibit under the pseudonym ShadedHues. This love of art guided his professional life by igniting a talent for web development.

Using his knowledge of frontend and backend development skills, James implements the latest coding languages and frameworks to translate beauty into code and create unique websites for organizations like the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation. He continues web development on a freelance basis and joined UBFSF to assist in delivering its invaluable services and opportunities on the web.

James currently works in the fintech industry as a project management director, translating business needs to technical solutions and driving those projects through to fruition.

Robert T. Chase is an associate professor of history. He is the author of We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners Rights in Postwar America; a national book award winner for Best Book for the Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice of the American Society of Criminology. He is the co-director of the national organization Historians Against Slavery and editor of Caging Borders and the Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance.

His work has been published in numerous scholarly journals and anthologies. A renowned intellectual on the history of prison and policing reform and state violence, his work has been featured on MSNBC, CNN, NPR, Newsweek, Washington Post, and a number of other media outlets.

Zebulon Vance Miletsky, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and History. His articles have appeared in the Trotter Review, the Historical Journal of Massachusetts, the Journal of Civil and Human Rights, and the Journal of Urban History. He is an Executive Board member of the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History. He is a regular contributor to the award-winning blog Black Perspectives, hosted by the African-American Intellectual Historical Society. He has written op-eds for Diverse Issues in Higher Education and is a columnist for the BK Reader. His new book Before Busing: A History of Boston’s Long Black Freedom Struggle was published in December 2022 by the University of North Carolina Press.

Miletsky was the recipient of a 2020 “Game Changer” Award by the Long Island Area NAACP branch. In 2021 he was honored by the Town of Brookhaven Black History Commission “for leadership and service to the community as a role model to the next generation.” He lives in Brooklyn and works with the UBFSF as an editor for the 100 Prisoner Book Publishing Literacy Program.

Willie Mack is a Ph. D. candidate at Stony Brook University and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Black Studies Department at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His research interests focus on race, capitalism and the carceral state in twentieth-century United States. His dissertation takes a transnational approach to the development of the carceral state in Haiti and the U.S. during the 1970 through the 1990s. Will has had articles published with “Black Perspectives” the blog for the African Americans Intellectual History Society, the Society for U.S. Intellectual Society, and “Next Chapter,” the digital forum for the University of Chicago’s Race and Capitalism Project. He has also won the Organization of American Historians’ 2022 John Higham Research Fellowship Award for graduate students writing doctoral dissertation in American History.

Susan Scheckel is an Associate Professor of English. Scheckel earned her Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley in 1992. After teaching at the University of Memphis and, briefly, at the University of Southern California, she came to Stony Brook University in 2000. She’s committed to showing that education in the humanities provides invaluable training in the acquisition of real-world skills. She is the editor of The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton University Press, 1998), which was the recipient of 1999 South Central Modern Language Association Book Award. She also co-edited Boundaries of Affect: Ethnicity and Emotion (Humanities Institute of Stony Brook Occasional Papers Series, 2007) with E. Ann Kaplan.

Julie Y. Huang is an associate professor of marketing at the College of Business. She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Yale University and was a postdoctoral fellow in the marketing department at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Dr. Huang studies consumers’ attitudes towards to products made by disadvantaged producers, including incarcerated laborers. Her theoretical and empirical work has been published in top-tier behavioral science journals, including Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Psychological Science, The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Social Psychological and Personality Science.

R.E.B.U.I.L.D. – Reinvesting in Every Black and Underserved Institution to Liberate and Diversify
Our Program & Public Policy Internship Program is an innovative program that allows student volunteers the opportunity to gain invaluable experience utilizing their education in political science, public administration, and other related fields to develop, direct and implement comprehensive program and policy development measures that have the potential to transform the dynamic in underrepresented communities.

Moctar Ayeva is a University of Georgia graduate student pursuing a Master’s in Public Administration. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from the University of Georgia. He has many awards such as being constantly present on the Dean’s list and was a Hope Scholarship recipient throughout his undergraduate education. Additional awards include the Military Officers Association of America and the Son’s of the American Revolution. Moctar has been hands-on in public service, volunteering at the Gwinnett County Public Library system & participating in Georgia State University’s Game Day Recycling program. Moctar joined the UBFSF Program and Public Policy Cohort to write and advocate for policy that grows communities and empowers them to become successful.

Tom Gambaro is a fourth-year student at the University of Michigan studying History and Psychology. He possesses a proven track record of working within the nonprofit space, having volunteered with several organizations dedicated to tackling Wicked problems such as gentrification, food deserts, redlining, and homelessness. He recently completed an independent research project investigating the root causes of and potential solutions for gentrification in East Palo Alto, California, which involved interviewing EPA community members. After completing his undergraduate degrees, Tom aspires to attend law school, where he hopes to continue learning about systemic injustices in the legal system and doing his part to contribute to meaningful change. Tom joined the UBFSF Program and Public Policy Cohort to write and advocate for programs and policy that grows communities and empowers them to become successful.

Laurie Tang is a fourth year student at the University of Michigan studying political science and history. She has received scholarships and accolades while at school, consistently maintaining her spot on the Dean’s List. She previously interned at ALPHA Education, a nonprofit organization that aims to educate the world on Asian history, where she worked on a historical research project about Hong Kong that will be featured in the Avery Wong Museum in Toronto. Just as she was able to impactfully educate herself on the hidden history of oppression in Asia, she wants to be a part of creating educational opportunities for communities who systematically are not afforded them, which is why she joined UBFSF. She hopes to attend law school in order to continue pursuing that goal. Laurie volunteers as our Program & Policy Coordinator.