Categories: Staff

Jackie Alas supports the SAFE Center as an Bilingual Intake Coordinator. She has over ten years of working in the medical field, providing direct services and community organization. Before joining the SAFE Center team, Jackie worked at Adventist Healthcare, where she was the Care Navigation Community Healthcare Worker. She has served as the patient advocate and liaison between the patient and the inpatient care team, a vital role in which she participated in interdisciplinary rounds by providing a voice for her patients. Jackie is pursuing her associate degree in Public Health from Howard Community College.

Shoshanna Allaire is an Office Manager working with the SAFE Center and the University of Maryland Baltimore (UMB). She earned an associate degree in Finance in 2017, an associate degree in Business Administration, Management, and Operations in 2018, and a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from University Maryland Global Campus in 2021. Ms. Allaire’s professional background includes working in various supporting roles within University System of Maryland universities as well as Howard Community College. She has volunteered on numerous committees including College Counsel, the Executive Support Group, the Middle States Periodic Review, the Safe Zone, the Power of Two, and managed the Giving Tree for several years.

Julia Aviles-Zavala, BSW, supports the SAFE Center as a Case Manager, bringing with her six years of work with CASA and three years of paralegal experience in immigration. She is bilingual in Spanish and English, and is a first generation American who takes pride in her Mexican and Honduran heritage. Julia is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where she obtained her B.A. in Social Work and Psychology. She is currently a student at the University of Maryland School of Social Work where she is pursuing her MSW.

Sophie Aron joined the SAFE Center staff in June, 2019 as a Research and Program Coordinator. In this role she will help develop and support the SAFE Center’s state and local task force work, public health research and program implementation, and survivor leadership programming. She also works to support the Center’s crisis intervention team. Before joining the SAFE Center in her current role, Ms. Aron interned for a year at the Center in a similar capacity while pursuing her Masters in Social Work. She has also completed an internship with social workers at a D.C. charter school and served a year of AmeriCorps conducting conflict mediation in Montgomery County middle and high schools. Ms. Aron has spent a year in India, Vietnam, South Africa, and Argentina studying healthcare systems and how trauma affects access to public healthcare systems. Ms. Aron earned her Masters in Social Work from the University of Maryland School of Social Work, and her BA in Anthropology from Hamilton College.

Ciara supports the SAFE Center as a Case Manager. She brings six years of experience in direct services, which include crisis intervention, suicide intervention, and case management. Ciara’s most recent positions include being a Case Manager at St. Vincent de Paul of Baltimore and a Crisis Intervention Counselor at the Baltimore Crisis Response, Inc. Ciara is pursuing a Master of Science in Counseling from Walden University.

Ashley Greene supports the SAFE Center as an Economic Empowerment Coordinator, working with trafficking survivors to secure employment, education, and housing, and connecting clients with the tools and resources necessary to lead self-sustaining lives. Ms. Greene joined the SAFE Center in January 2021, bringing with her nearly a decade of experience as an employment specialist, during which she developed high-level skills in client relations, pre-employment assessment, and interpersonal communication. Her past work includes job counseling and coaching at non-profits and social service providers, as well as experience in community health as a patient account representative. Ms. Greene also brings to the SAFE Center team over 3 years’ experience working with Columbus House Shelter to fight against homelessness, where she supported clients’ transition back into the community. She has also worked with the re-entry population as an advocate, supporting them as they reenter society. Ms. Greene plans to continue her work in the Workforce Development field at the SAFE Center developing new partnerships to provide employment to trafficking survivors.

Ashwini Jaisingh, Esq., Senior Immigration Attorney, has more than 10 years of experience working on immigrant and worker rights issues, including domestic worker rights, wage theft, and labor trafficking. Prior to joining the SAFE Center, Ms. Jaisingh was a staff attorney at the Torture Abolition and Survivor Support Coalition (TASSC) International, where she represented torture survivors in asylum cases and family petitions, while also tracking immigration policy changes and engaging in advocacy efforts. Before beginning law school, Ms. Jaisingh spent six years as an organizer at CASA de Maryland, where she worked with community members, including dozens of labor trafficking survivors, on immigrant and worker rights campaigns. She earned her JD from American University Washington College of Law, and her BA in Anthropology and Spanish from Georgetown University. She is fluent in Spanish.

Tanejah Jones, MSW, LCSW joined the SAFE Center as a Prevention Social Worker in September, 2020. Tanejah’s primary role is to help develop, implement and manage the Prevention Project that will be presented in high schools within Prince George’s County. In addition to the prevention project, she is also providing clinical, crisis intervention, and individual and group therapy services at the Center. Ms. Jones completed a Master’s degree Clinical Social Work from Simmons University in Boston, MA. During her time at Simmons she interned with Dove, Inc., a community domestic violence organization as an outreach and education specialist. Her role was to go into the community, local middle schools and high schools to present about domestic violence and the warning signs of an abusive relationship. Additionally, she interned at the Centers for Violence Prevention and Recovery (CVPR) at Beth Israel Medical Center working with survivors of domestic violence, community violence, sexual assaults, and human trafficking. At CVPR she also worked one-on-one and facilitated groups with survivors of violence using trauma-informed care. Tanejah has a passion for prevention work and enjoys working within the community.

Connie Kratovil-Lavelle, JD, Senior Legal Advisor, is building and expanding the SAFE Center’s pro-bono and low-bono attorney networks to seamlessly connect our clients to attorneys when our clients have family law, landlord/tenant, criminal justice, labor and employment, and legal issues other than or in addition to immigration. An attorney, collaborative law practitioner, and mediator, Connie has 20 years of experience developing and managing legal service programs for non-profits. She established a legal service and social justice organization that promotes the peaceful resolution of conflicts through collaborative law and other forms of alternative dispute resolution, provides pro bono and reduced fee legal services to persons of low and moderate income, and offers restorative justice services. Prior, Connie served for 10 years as executive director of the Department of Family Administration within the Maryland’s Judiciary Administrative Office of the Courts in Annapolis. Her work included developing policy and programs promoting best practices in family law cases, promoting family court reform in the State; managing all Judiciary domestic violence programs and projects; and developing programs that expand the use of alternative dispute resolution in domestic and juvenile cases. Connie developed the first collaborative law program on-site in the Maryland courts for family law and probate cases, called the Expedited Collaborative Process. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Maryland Legal Services Corporation Award for improving the civil legal services delivery system in Maryland; Maryland Access to Justice award for developing programs within the Maryland Judiciary; the Women’s Law Center of Maryland Access to Justice award, Civil Justice of Maryland award for developing a reduced fee legal service program, and the Daily Record’s Maryland’s Top 100 Women. 

Neil Mallon, LCSW-C is a clinical social worker with The Institute for Innovation & Implementation at the University of Maryland, School of Social Work and a clinical field instructor and advisor to the University of Maryland SAFE Center. Mr. Mallon has over ten years of clinical and macro social work practice experience within a variety of service settings, including child welfare, mental health, immigration, staff training/development, research and evaluation. In his current role at The Institute, Mr. Mallon works extensively with Maryland’s public and private child welfare providers to support the implementation and integration of a functional assessment tool to support decision making, quality improvement initiatives, and outcomes monitoring for youth and families served by the state’s child welfare systems. He is also the clinical field instructor for social work student interns at the SAFE Center and advisor for case management related policies and practice protocols. Mr. Mallon has assisted in the development of the Center’s trauma-informed and survivor-centered approach to practice and serves as a liaison to the State’s public and private child serving systems to support cross system collaboration in service delivery for domestic minor victims of trafficking. Mr. Mallon earned a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Towson University and a Master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Maryland, Baltimore.