Earl Simms is the co-founder and CEO of Restorative Community Solutions, whose leadership is rooted in 22 years served in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation — an experience that transformed his life and defined his mission. That journey through incarceration, healing, and reentry gave Earl a firsthand understanding of the systems he now works to change, and an unshakeable conviction that people with lived experience must hold real power in designing the solutions. A Certified Community Care Coach and Mediator with over a decade of experience in direct service, nonprofit leadership, and policy advocacy, he is a recognized leader in California's criminal justice reform and alternatives-to-incarceration movements — formerly a MacArthur Foundation Safety and Justice Challenge fellow, former Co-Chair of the Racial Equity Workgroup for California's Interagency Council on Homelessness, and currently co-facilitating the Community Power Network through RWJF's Systems for Alignment Innovation Hub. Through his consulting practice he advises on community engagement strategy and embeds restorative justice as an alternative to punitive responses in permanent supportive housing settings. At RCS, he leads the Transformative Engagement Initiative, a peer-led cohort model supporting BIPOC-led, justice-centered organizations to become CalAIM and Medicaid Reentry Waiver providers — investing in community ownership as the most credible and lasting path to systems change.

Erin Kennedy, JD is a California- and Kansas-admitted attorney, nonprofit executive, and mediator whose career has been shaped by a simple conviction: that systems built on wealth and exclusion cannot rehabilitate or heal the communities they claim to serve. Drawing on her own experience navigating the civil and criminal legal system, she went from practicing law to building community-based responses to the social problems that law alone cannot solve — moving through direct service, compliance, and leadership roles spanning Medi-Cal-financed care, permanent supportive housing, and HUD/CoC-funded homelessness systems. She has advised SF's Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing on community engagement informing their five-year strategic plan, consults with permanent supportive housing providers on restorative justice alternatives to punitive responses, and co-founded Restorative Community Solutions — built to design community-driven solutions for communities impacted by mass incarceration. Through RCS, she provides free technical assistance in compliance, program design, and leadership development to organizations led by people with lived experience, with current work focused on expanding access to Medicaid Reentry Waiver funding as a pathway to community ownership over the systems that have historically underserved them.

​