Friends of CLN Staff

Ellen Tuzzolo, Executive Director (resume)

Before accepting the interim executive director position in Jan. 2011 and now executive director (as of Nov. 2011), Ellen Tuzzolo was the director of southern initiatives for the Justice Policy Institute, where she worked to reduce the number of women incarcerated in the state of Alabama.

Ellen's seven years at Camp Little Notch (CLN) as a staff member was the start of her career in service to youth and women. At CLN, Ellen led numerous wilderness canoeing, biking, and rock climbing trips. After attending Wesleyan University, Ellen was a special education teacher in the New Orleans public schools for three years. Her next career move provided alternatives to incarceration for people in the San Francisco County Jail through her work at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, and subsequently served as an educator in a wilderness alternative to incarceration program for youth in the Massachusetts juvenile justice system. After Hurricane Katrina, Ellen returned to Louisiana to devote her time to criminal justice, juvenile justice, and education reform through her efforts at the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL). At JJPL Ellen worked on numerous local and statewide juvenile and criminal justice campaigns, raised funding to launch JJPL’s work with gay, lesbian, transgendered, queer and questioning youth, and lobbied successfully for the closure of the infamous youth prison—Jetson Center for Youth. Ellen also founded “Schools First”—a project that continues to reduce the number of suspensions, expulsions, school arrests and push-outs in schools throughout New Orleans. Ellen returned to Camp Little Notch as the assistant director in 2008. She is an adult supporter of the FYRE Youth Squad, a founding board member of the New Orleans Parent Organizing Network, and a founding board member of Friends of Camp Little Notch.