Erica Nelson
Erica Nelson (she/her) has been working to advance social, racial, environmental and economic justice for over 20 years. Her work includes advancing practice and policy reform in child welfare and youth justice as well as leading efforts to address the systemic and structural drivers that perpetuate and compound racial and economic inequities. She is a visionary, strategist and social entrepreneur whose love language is transformative policy change and who is deeply committed to increasing access to justice for under-resourced individuals, families and communities.
Erica began her career as an attorney at the Center for Family Representation representing parents involved in New York City’s child welfare system. After moving to Wisconsin in 2010, she founded and directed the Race to Equity project, served as Advocacy Director at Kids Forward and is currently Executive Director of LIFT Wisconsin.
Nelson is a graduate of UW-Madison and Rutgers Law School. Before entering law school, her first career was as a contemporary ballet dancer in New York City. She has two amazing children, an overly energetic Labrador, and strives to be proficient at mountain biking and sailing among many other things.
In-Person | PM Session B
2:45 PM - 4:00 PM
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Facilitated By: Sarah Oberholtzer, Alberto Prado, and Erica Nelson
Audience: Open to EveryoneLIFT Wisconsin in partnership with Fined Out, proposes a session that includes: a short film which shows how cycles of fines and fees punish poverty and how communities are teaming up to help people restore their licenses. Our goal is to use our multimedia projects that exposes how unjust fees and fines punish poverty and how communities are fighting back against a system designed to keep them paying while honoring their dignity and self-agency.The systems that revolve around the compounding harm of unpaid debt that often ripples into barriers to employment, housing instability, and deeper complications in civil and criminal legal systems is often misunderstood.
We will also showcase the Legal Tune Up tool and show how users can access free legal assistance that clears civil legal barriers for Wisconsin families. Everyone deserves access to justice, yet government resources dedicated to civil legal aid are dwindling, or nonexistent, while the need continues to grow at an exponential rate. Low-income individuals and their families, especially those in rural areas, are becoming further entrenched in legal deserts.
This session speaks directly to the Summit’s core practices:
Abolition: fines and fees enforcement is a clear example of how carceral systems substitute punishment for care. The film, the game, and the Legal Tune Up tool point toward community-based and legal navigator programs that restore access and agency rather than extract debt.
Repair: The session centers healing and restoration of relationships and trust for communities harmed by systemic overreach, and offers attendees a concrete, ongoing practice, such as becoming a legal navigator that can act on that repair.
For our session, we want attendees to experience and see how the devastating impact of excessive fines and fees on working families in our communities, and how we can choose to change this unjust system. We want to create actionable work and foster new legal navigators from across rural and urban Wisconsin to help close the access to justice gaps.