Yoel Haile – Co-Director, Priority Africa Network

 

Yoel Haile is Co-Director of Priority Africa Network and serves as the Director of the Criminal Justice Program at the ACLU of Northern California. He brings a deep commitment to racial justice, Black liberation, and community-led organizing, shaped by his work both in grassroots spaces and policy advocacy.

 

Raised in Asmara, Eritrea, and based in California since 2006, Yoel has spent more than a decade organizing to dismantle systems of oppression that harm Black, Brown, and immigrant communities. At the ACLU, he leads statewide efforts to end mass incarceration, criminalization, and police violence.

 

As a student organizer at UC Santa Barbara, he helped secure over $3.7 million in funding for Black student recruitment and retention. As the founding Political Director of the Afrikan Black Coalition, he led successful campaigns that pushed the University of California to divest nearly $30 million from private prisons and end $475 million in contracts with Wells Fargo over its role in financing incarceration.

 

Yoel also works alongside African refugees navigating the immigration and asylum systems and holds a Master’s in Public Policy from UC Berkeley’s Goldman School. At PAN, he supports community power-building in the Bay Area, working with Black and African diaspora communities toward racial and migrant justice.