Avalon Edwards

Avalon Edwards is a Policy Associate with Starting Over, Inc., a transitional housing and wraparound services provider in Riverside County. As a student at Pitzer College, Avalon organized with Claremont Colleges Prison Abolition Collective, where they co-created spaces for collective learning and community engagement. For their thesis, Avalon worked with formerly incarcerated community leaders to create a policy advocacy guide to end the practice of pregnancy shackling in prisons and jails. In their current role, they work with communities directly impacted by mass incarceration to advocate for decarceration, sheriff accountability, and the reallocation of police and jail budgets to community-based resources. They aim to lift up the voices of currently and formerly incarcerated people, specifically BIPOC, women, and LGBTQI2S people in abolitionist organizing spaces.