Emancipate NC is proud to announce that Strategic Director Elizabeth Simpson and Organizer Toia Potts will be presenting at the 2026 National Parent Representation Conference, co-sponsored by the ABA Center on Children and the Law and the National Alliance for Parent Representation.
Their presentation, “Client-Directed Representation and Reform Participatory Defense: A Civil Rights Approach to Representing Families,” will explore what becomes possible when parents are not simply treated as clients, but as leaders, advocates, and partners in the fight for family liberation.
Toia Potts brings a deeply personal perspective to this work. A mother who lost two sons to the family policing system, Toia has transformed her experience into a powerful commitment to protecting other families. Alongside her attorney, Elizabeth Simpson, she has pursued a multidisciplinary approach to family defense that extends far beyond the courtroom.
Together, they have worked to reunite Toia’s family and protect other families through litigation, advocacy, narrative work, mutual aid, and leadership development. Their work demonstrates how parent-led advocacy and participatory defense can challenge systems that separate families while building new models of support, accountability, and collective power.
At the heart of their presentation is a powerful lesson: families most impacted by the child welfare system must have a meaningful voice in shaping the strategies used to defend them and transform the systems that harm them.
Through their shared work, Toia and Elizabeth have built more than an attorney-client relationship. As they describe it, “In the process, they became family themselves.”
Emancipate NC is honored to have Elizabeth and Toia present on a national stage and to share their vision for a civil-rights approach to representing families. Their work reflects Emancipate NC’s commitment to placing directly impacted people at the center of legal advocacy, organizing, and movement-building—and to transforming individual struggles into collective power for lasting change.