Cass Severe

Cass Severe is a nationally recognized reentry strategist, speaker, and justice-impacted leader dedicated to dismantling barriers for women returning home from incarceration. As the Founder of Meet Her At The Gate (MHATG), she created a transformative pre-release and reentry initiative that partners with the New Jersey Department of Corrections to provide coordinated discharge planning, a red-carpet homecoming experience, housing navigation, family reunification support, and long-term wraparound care rooted in dignity, sisterhood, and community.

Her work is deeply personal. Once incarcerated in the very facility she now serves, Cass first returned as a member of the Board of Trustees and then transitioned into direct in-prison programming, bringing her journey full circle and redefining what successful reintegration can look like when led by lived experience. Today, she walks alongside women both inside the gates and beyond them, ensuring they do not return home alone but to a continuum of care designed for healing, stability, and economic mobility.

Cass has played a key role in nonprofit development within New Jersey’s violence prevention and reentry ecosystem and is a trusted partner to correctional institutions, policymakers, and grassroots organizations working to implement trauma-informed, community-led solutions. A proud NJSTEP graduate of Rutgers University–Newark, she earned her Master of Social Work from Monmouth University in 2025 and uses both her education and lived expertise to influence policy, practice, and systems change.

Her leadership has been cultivated through national fellowships and movement spaces including the Beyond the Bars Fellowship at Columbia University, the Collective Leadership Institute (CLI), and the Alumni Network Coalition (ANC). She has shared her testimony on national platforms, where her story of healing, faith, and radical transformation led to a direct investment into MHATG’s work, fueling the expansion of services for justice-impacted women.

At the heart of everything she builds is a bold belief: reentry is not a moment, it is a continuum. Through Meet Her At The Gate, Cass is creating the models, partnerships, and pathways that allow women to return home whole, rebuild their families, secure housing and employment, and step into leadership in their own right.