IPV and Special Populations

Stephanie Nilva is the founding director of Day One, an organization that partners with New York City youth to end dating abuse and domestic violence through community education, supportive services, legal advocacy and leadership development. Prior to establishing Day One in October 2005, Stephanie was the Director of Break the Cycle New York, which she launched as the local office of a national organization in 2003.

Nilva has been working in the domestic violence field throughout her legal career, practicing family and matrimonial law, specializing in relationship abuse. She has published two articles for practitioners on the subject of teen dating abuse and appeared on national television as an expert in the field. 

Immediately following law school, Nilva was the recipient of a New York State IOLA Legal Services Fellowship designed to provide community education and direct representation in response to domestic violence in the Orthodox Jewish community.  Following her work in New York at both Legal Services for New York and New York Legal Assistance Group,  Nilva became the acting director and managing attorney at Community Law Center (now Law Center for Families) in Oakland, California. During her time in California, Nilva also provided direct representation to clients in family law proceedings throughout Alameda County. Nilva returned to New York and became the executive director of Legal Information for Families Today (LIFT), an organization devoted to helping individuals navigate the New York City child welfare and family court systems. 

Sharon Stapel is the executive director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project (AVP). AVP is the country’s largest organization dedicated to eliminating hate violence, sexual violence, and domestic/intimate partner violence affecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) and HIV-affected communities.

Stapel sits on the LGBT Advisory Committee to the New York Police Department and the New York City Family Court LGBT Advisory Committee. She is a stakeholder of the Vera Institute’s Promising Practice Initiative, a national effort with the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women to identify and share promising practices that have been developed since 1994 to address domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking. She is also a partner in the National Center for Crime Victim’s national capacity-building initiative, which will build capacity in the crime victims’ field to better serve victims of crime.

Prior to joining AVP, Stapel directed domestic violence legal programs at South Brooklyn Legal Services and the Legal Aid Society, where she began her legal career as a staff attorney and created Legal Aid’s first dedicated domestic violence project. Sharon was an adjunct professor of law at CUNY School of Law and an adjunct assistant professor at Hunter College. Prior to going to law school, Sharon worked on anti-violence issues in South Africa with the African National Congress’s Youth and Women Leagues. Sharon began her career in anti-violence work in 1989 as a volunteer for a local domestic violence shelter in Massachusetts.

Dr. Yoshihama's research interests are violence against women, immigrants, mental health, and community organizing. Her research efforts reflect her ongoing advocacy work in Asian Pacific Islander communities in the United States and in Japan over the past two decades.

Yoshihama has conducted numerous community-based research projects on domestic violence both in the United States and Japan, including a nationwide survey in Japan, a study of Japanese-American women in Los Angeles, and life history calendar studies of battered women in Michigan, Tokyo, and San Francisco. She also directs participatory action research projects aimed at organizing and mobilizing local community members to promote collective action to prevent domestic violence. One recent project involves developing, implementing, and evaluating a broad communications campaign in a local Indian community. In addition to serving on the steering committee of the Asian & Pacific Islander Institute on Domestic Violence, Yoshihama serves on advisory committees of various organizations dedicated to ending domestic violence.