Emily Blake serves as Impact Justice’s Project Director to scale the housing innovation and success of The Homecoming Project to Los Angeles.
As a forensic social worker, Emily is passionate about transforming the youth and adult criminal legal systems through strength and community-based transformative justice, education, housing and career programming. Her first job out of graduate school was with New Roads for New Visions at the New Visions Foundation (now the Coalition for Engaged Education) strengthening pathways to higher education for youth that were detained in probation Camp David Gonzales. In this role, Emily helped to launch a community center in South Central Los Angeles supporting youth and their families in navigating the juvenile legal system, get off probation, secure employment, graduate from high school, and successfully persist in higher education. Emily also worked at the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce as a Smart Justice Program Manager advancing Fair Chance Hiring best practices in the business community and as the L.A. Compact Manager, applying collective impact approaches to improve cradle-to-career outcomes. Most recently, Emily taught Advanced Juvenile/ Youth Justice Policy to graduate social work students at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and works as a justice focused consultant at a consulting firm she founded in 2014, Change For Justice Consulting.
Emily received her Masters in Social Work from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs with a concentration in Social Work with Organizations, Communities, and Policy. She is skilled in nonprofit management, social enterprise, restorative justice, and leadership development, as well as policy advocacy and diverse fundraising strategies. While Emily obtained her BA in Psychology with a Minor in Public Policy from UCLA, she attributes her first education to growing up in inner-city communities of the East Bay Area. That experiential education made her intimately familiar with poverty, violence, incarceration, and homelessness; as well as the resilience and beauty of the human spirit. Her conviction to transform injustice and empower communities stems from this foundation. Emily believes that solutions to society’s most perilous problems are community and strength based. As a result, she has committed her life to a career in social justice, speaking truth to power, and transmuting fear to love.