Our Team
Kanoya Ali
Kanoya Ali, or Ali as he is popularly known, is a pillar in his southside Chicago community, and is a lead life coach and mentor with Chicago CRED. Ali’s professional background for the past decade engages him with young men who desire to make positive changes in their lives. As such, Ali is a proponent of using the arts to channel creativity and express emotions, especially through written and spoken word.
He is the co-host & co-founder of THECHIPODCAST which is home to a brand new show via zoom called CREDTALKS. It’s a show that allows viewers the chance to listen to interviews from different game changers, professionals, celebrities and influencers and gives them the ability to ask questions at the end.
Ali is now working to start EXxperts as a nonprofit organization that seeks to simultaneously assist “returning citizens” and the “at risk population.”
Dr. Lance Williams
Lance Williams is a Professor of Urban Community Studies at the historic Jacob H. Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies at Northeastern Illinois University. His fields of special interest include the mass media’s influence on adolescent behaviors and culture, street organizations, and youth violence.
Dr. Williams served as the National Coordinator of the African American Male Initiative for the President’s Roundtable.
He is the author of Culture and Perceptions of Violence Related Behaviors Among Adolescents, co-author of the book titled The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Fall, Rise and Resurgence of an American Gang and author of the forth coming book, King David and Boss Daley.
His expertise has been frequently aired and published by numerous international, national, and local media outlets such as Al Jazeera , French TV Canal, CNN, BET, HBO, Ebony & Jet Magazine, and a number of other cable, television, radio and print media.
Curtis Amir Toler
Curtis is one of the leading advocates for peace and non-violence in Chicago. As director of community relations for Chicago CRED, he is committed to impacting the culture of violence in Chicago by linking at-risk young men with the chance to reset their lives through job training and permanent employment opportunities.
A native of Chicago and a former leader of one of the city’s most notorious street gangs, today Curtis focuses on leading current gang members into settling their disagreements on the streets, and into a new future reconnected to jobs and community restoration. His central passion is to link neighborhoods suffering from poverty and violence to corporations and community-based organizations best poised to provide both an economic and social pathway to peace stability.
Curtis has previously worked as a gang intervention specialist, as the lead trainer at the National Center for Violence Interruption, as the supervisor of outreach at Ceasefire. He consults with journalists and artists, and is a member of the Community Justice Task Force and is a Chicago Gang Historian.
Alex Stein
Alex is a criminal defense and civil rights attorney in Chicago. As a lawyer, he has helped to successfully defend many people in Chicago from state and federal cases, and has sued Chicago Police officers, the Cook County Sheriff, and prison guards around the state. He has also worked to help numerous people be paroled after serving upwards of 40 years in Illinois prisons.
As a former volunteer with the Chicago Community Bond Fund, Alex helped advance numerous changes to Illinois’ pretrial criminal system and conducted extensive data analysis into Cook County’s bond court. He is involved in Chicago’s movement to abolish the prison-industrial complex and defund the Chicago Police Department, and believes the power for change comes from the communities who are most directly impacted by the injustice of criminalization and surveillance.
Tremaine Lee
Tremaine Lee grew up in Austin in Chicago, where he played football at St. Pat’s, eventually going to Tennessee State on a football scholarship. After school, he became a truck driver, and after more than 10 years as a driver, started his own trucking company, Cornerstone Elite. He now owns five trucks and has eight employees. Tremaine has long volunteered with Kingdom of Angels church, where his mother is the pastor. He has also always wanted to use his trucking experience to support and grow the community, recognizing that trucking can bring opportunities to many people, providing skills and steady pay while also enabling drivers to see places all around the country.
Tremaine brings to EXxperts the vision of using trucking as a way to provide jobs for reentering citizens and mentor young people, while helping them build business and entrepreneurship skills and support their families.
Steve Gates
Steve is from Chicago, a lifelong Roseland resident, and is proud to bring his voice to all we do. Justice and youth equity are his life’s work, and Chicago Beyond lets him approach the issues from a different angle, supporting communities that are often marginalized in innovative ways. He loves working hand-in-hand with our partners — currently, he acts as Site Manager for Chicago CRED’s Roseland efforts.
Steve has his B.A. in Criminal Justice from Jackson State University and his M.A. in Social Work from the University of Chicago with a concentration in Violence Prevention. He has previously served as a Director at Youth Advocate Programs, Inc. and helped launch the program here in Chicago.