Men Stopping Violence

Shelley Serdahely
executive director
Shelley Serdahely has worked to end violence against women since the 1970s. In 1981 the St. Vincent de Paul Society invited her to lead its efforts to open a shelter for women who were victims of violence. Taking a leave of absence from her executive position with a medical diagnostic laboratory, Serdahely worked with staff and volunteers to open Rosalie House in San Francisco within eight months.

Serdahely never went back to the for-profit sector. She immediately joined Women Organized to Make Abuse Nonexistent (WOMAN), Inc. as its director of fundraising, and helped to more than double the organization's income in the first six months. While at WOMAN, Inc. Serdahely created a partnership with the San Francisco Bar Association that resulted in the first pro bono legal clinic for battered women. She also increased the budget by more than 400 percent. When she left the staff of WOMAN, Inc., she was invited to join their board of directors and was immediately elected board chair. In that position, she was able to guide WOMAN, Inc. in its restructuring efforts to ensure accountability to clients and funders and institute personnel policies that protected the rights of women of color who worked for the organization.

In 1989, Serdahely became the executive director of Alternatives to Violence in Hawaii, a program that housed services for women and children who were victims of violence and a batterers' intervention program. Her greatest accomplishment during this time was the creation of an effective domestic violence task force that included judges, police, shelters and other social services agencies.

From 1992-1999, she served as the executive director of The Fundraising Project, funded by the Ford Foundation to build the fundraising capacity of legal services programs throughout the country. In 1999, the board of The Fundraising Project conducted a survey and found that the number of legal services programs conducting fundraising campaigns had increased from 10 percent to 85 percent. This meant that the mission of the organization had been fulfilled and the organization was dissolved. A sister organization, Management Information and Exchange, was chosen to continue to work of providing fundraising training for legal services programs.

Before coming to Men Stopping Violence (MSV), Serdahely served as the executive director of the Jeannette Rankin Foundation, which provides grants to low-income women age 35 and older who are enrolled in a college or vocational training program. She served as the executive director for two years, during which time the foundation increased the number of educational grants awarded from 20 to 45, as well as increasing the amount of each grant by 25 percent. Serdahely currently serves as a member of the national advisory board of the Jeannette Rankin Foundation.

Serdahely joined the MSV team as executive director in 2004. Her primary goal in this position is to broaden the reach of the organization, based on her belief that men of conscience will work to end violence against women when they come to recognize its impact on the women and children in their lives. Since she has been in this leadership role, MSV has created the program Because We Have Daughters® and the True Ally committee, expanded its training efforts, and created a new curriculum for educating individual men, Men At Work. She worked with the board of directors to create MSV's premier fundraising event, One Vision, Many Voices. While raising a significant portion of the organization's budget, the One Vision, Many Voices event provides a forum in which to demonstrate that the movement to end violence is a very big tent that holds CEOs and college-aged activists alike.

She served on the board of the Women's Resource Center to End Domestic Violence for 10 years and is currently a commissioner on the Georgia Commission on Family Violence.

For more information, feel free to e-mail Shelley Serdahely.

Ulester Douglas, M.S.W.
associate director
Ulester Douglas is a certified imago relationship therapist and has specialized training in working with individuals, families and communities affected by violence. He completed his graduate work at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and is a National Institute of Mental Health Fellow.

Douglas was honored by Lifetime Television for Women and the National Network to End Domestic Violence in 2003 for his work to end violence against women and has received numerous awards including the National Black Herstory Task Force Comrade Salute Award in 2004. He has been interviewed by several national and local media including CNN, the Tom Joyner Morning Show, The Al Sharpton Show, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Atlanta's WVEE-FM (V103).

He has authored and co-authored articles and curricula on family violence and other human rights issues, including the article "Deconstructing Male Violence Against Women: The Men Stopping Violence Community-Accountability Model" (2008, Violence Against Women, Sage Publications); the curriculum Men at Work: Building Safe Communities; the article "Violence Against Women: The State of Batterer Intervention Prevention Programs" with Ileana Arias, Juergen Dankwork, Mary Ann Dutton and Kathlyn Stein (2002, The Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics); the article "Men and Women Working Together to End Violence," with Marie Fortune, Brian Ogawa and James Poling (2000, The Journal of Religion and Abuse); and the book chapter "African-American Men Who Batter: A Community-Centered Approach to Prevention and Intervention" (2008, Family Violence and Men of Color: Healing the Wounded Male Spirit, Springer Publishing Company).

Douglas has provided consultation, training and keynote presentations in 40 states, the Caribbean and Great Britain to community-based organizations, universities, corporations and government agencies. These include: U.S. Department of Defense; U.S. Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women; National Association of Attorneys General; National College of District Attorneys; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics.

He was a member of the MSV delegation to Great Britain in 2005. As a guest of the home office, he was invited to contribute to the discourse on "best practices" in engaging men to end violence against women. He also was a member of the U.S. delegation at The Global Partnership to End Violence Against Women Summit in Washington, D.C., in 2010. He was one of the first men to serve on the board of directors of the National Network to End Domestic Violence and on several advisory boards and committees, including the International Association of Chiefs of Police's National Violence Against Women Advisory Group, the Corporate Alliance to End Partner Violence Advisory Board, and the Office on Violence Against Women's Safe Havens National Steering Committee.

For more information, feel free to e-mail Ulester Douglas.

Sulaiman Nuriddin, M.Ed.
director of men's education
Sulaiman Nuriddin began working with MSV in 1987 after completing the organization's year-long internship program. He currently oversees educational interventions for MSV.

Nuriddin works closely with the DeKalb County (Ga.) court system, intervening with men who have been arrested for domestic violence. He co-instructs ongoing classes for convicted and self-referred men and has been instrumental in planning effective interventions with men of color who batter. He has conducted training for such organizations as 100 Black Men, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., The Institute on Domestic Violence in the African-American Community, The Black Church in Domestic Violence Institute and the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives. He also has led trainings at Clark Atlanta University, and Morehouse and Spelman colleges.

Additionally, Nuriddin has conducted trainings for the National Council of Churches, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health, the National Basketball Association Summer Youth Program, the Atlanta Police Department and the U.S. Department of Justice. He has served as a consultant for Motivational Educational Entertainment (MEE), The Vera Institute of Justice, and The National Men’s Network to End Domestic and Sexual Violence. Internationally, he has co-led a training initiative in Great Britain and Puerto Rico.
He has participated in discussion groups regarding domestic violence with the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In 2010, Nuriddin was chosen to serve as part of a delegation to evaluate Morrocco's efforts to end domestic violence.

For more information, feel free to e-mail Sulaiman Nuriddin.

Lee Giordano, M.Ed.
training coordinator
Lee Giordano is a community organizer and violence prevention advocate, having presented hundreds of workshops on ending men's violence against women to various community organizations, university students, faculty and staff, as well as middle and high school students. Most notably, he co-presented "Justice for African-American Women: Organizing Men to End Sexual Assault" at Georgia Network to End Sexual Assault's annual conference, and "Dismantling Patriarchy," a weekend seminar exploring patriarchy with University of Massachusetts undergraduate students.

Giordano has organized community events and forums, including an annual college symposium on sexual assault for faculty and staff on university campuses from around Georgia. He also helped coordinate "Echoes of Violence," a national conference sponsored by the National Organization of Men Against Sexism intended to bring together a diverse group of people to build and strengthen alliances that work for social justice and equality, with the long-term vision of preventing and ending violence in communities.

A graduate of Georgia State University with a Bachelors of Science in sociology and a minor in women's studies, Giordano recently received his master's degree in education in social justice education from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

For more information, feel free to e-mail Lee Giordano.

Bernard Ellis
education coordinator
Bernard Ellis is a mentor, community organizer, educator, and community activist. He is the President of the Local School Advisory Council in South Fulton County Georgia, the membership Chairman for South Fulton County Boy Scouts of America, and the founder of Urbane Mentorship, dedicated to providing guidance in the areas of career choices, social skills, healthy choices, and understanding of environmental influences on behavior. After mentoring in the school systems in Florida and Georgia, in the effort of helping teenagers prepare for college, he also talks with teens about understanding cultural differences. He has presented for “Mothers Raising Sons “Rites of Passage”, South Fulton Boy Scouts of America “Pinewood Derby”, The 500 Role Models of Florida “Leadership”, and career day at middle and high schools in Florida and Georgia.

Bernard has been involved in community awareness for more than 17 years. He is currently employed with Men Stopping Violence (MSV) as the Education Coordinator. After going through an internship with MSV and dealing with his own controlling behaviors, he began to educate other men about their controls. Bernard also coordinates MSV’s Because We Have Daughters (BWHD) program, which is a program that engages men and their daughters in discussions about the issues that women and girls face on a day to day basis.

Bernard was dually enrolled at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Birmingham College of Allied Health where he received a degree in Allied Health Management. For more information, feel free to e-mail Bernard Ellis.

For more information, feel free to e-mail Bernard Ellis.

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