Susan Burton is a visionary, inspirational leader of the criminal justice reform movement, author of award-winning memoir, Becoming Ms. Burton, and founder of A New Way of Life Reentry Project (ANWOL). ANWOL’s approach to reentry is internationally recognized as an innovative model that creates welcoming and healing spaces for women to rejoin their communities after incarceration while developing as leaders to work toward liberation. In 2018,  Ms. Burton launched the SAFE (Sisterhood Alliance for Freedom and Equality) Housing Network to replicate the effective and humane reentry model.  The network now includes 31 members located across the United States, Uganda, Nigeria, and Kenya.  

The impact of her work and leadership has been recognized through numerous awards. In 2010, she was named a CNN Top Ten Hero and received the prestigious Citizen Activist Award from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She is also the recipient of the Encore Purpose Prize (2012) and the James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award (2014) among many more.
Burton is also the co-founder of All of Us or None (AOUON) and the Formerly Incarcerated & Convicted People and Families Movement (FICPFM), both national grassroots civil rights movements composed of individuals impacted by incarceration. In collaboration with UCLA’s Critical Race Studies Program, she launched an employment rights reentry legal clinic, which has grown to be the largest of its kind in Southern California.  ANWOL has since expanded its services beyond housing to include pro bono legal support, workforce development and education readiness, family reunification services, and leadership development. Their efforts provided housing to over 1,600 women and their children, reunited over 400 parents with their children and provided pro bono legal services to over 4,000 formerly incarcerated individuals.