2020 Fellows Making an Impact, from Local to Global, in our Increasingly Authoritarian World
Date: July 16, 2020
Since the Sorensen Center Fellowship Program’s inception five years ago, more than 80 students have used their skills and experience to address global challenges and serve local and global communities. Fellows have served throughout the U.S. and around the world on five continents.
At a time when our city and country greatly need social justice advocates, a generous gift from the Jerome L. Greene Foundation enabled the Sorensen Center to more than double the number of Fellows working in New York City in all five boroughs. The impressive cohort of 2020 Fellows are working to protect and advocate for the most vulnerable in our NYC communities, addressing racial justice, voter rights, asylum and immigration, LGBT+ rights, health access, worker rights, housing, and poverty.
Nora Howe, a 2020 Greene Foundation-funded Fellow, who is working at NAACP LDF said, “I’m interested in legal work that ends school segregation, ensures fair funding, and ends the school to prison pipeline. At LDF, I’m focused on education equity, and have also been able to work on LDF voting rights projects, building on my work as a Sorensen Center Voting Rights Initiative student leader.”
The Center’s partnership with the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives led to additional Fellowship funding from the NYC Council for students addressing challenges affecting LGBT+ communities in NYC. Elisabeth Bernard, a NYC Council-funded Fellow working at Common Justice, said, “LGBTQ youth are some of the most forgotten populations. I will help foster a brighter future and more equity for LGBTQ young people and Black and Brown people.”
2020 Scholar-in-Residence Wolfgang Kaleck with faculty and students including 2019 Fellows Mahum Shabir and Dannelly Rodriguez and Research Assistant Shannon Haupt
While the inability to travel abroad complicated the plans of current Fellows serving communities outside of the U.S., the resilient Fellows forged ahead by adapting their time zone settings to work remotely from New York. By working from local to global, the Center’s Fellows are able to share best practices with communities working on similar issues in other countries. For example, Fellows are working with Make the Road and Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) to represent asylum seekers and separated families while other Fellows are working to protect rights of clients facing persecution and injustices abroad. While Elisabeth addresses LGBTQ issues at home, Fellow Hannah Kohn addresses them globally at Outright Action International.
The Center enriches the learning environment at CUNY Law School by providing insights into addressing global problems from different perspectives while building new relationships. A succession of accomplished legal scholars and practitioners host seminars open to all CUNY Law students and guest lecture in classrooms. The Center’s most recent Scholars-in-Residence, Wolfgang Kaleck, Secretary General of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, and Maina Kiai, a Kenyan lawyer who served as UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, provided relevant expertise in fighting authoritarian regimes. Speakers in the Center’s popular “Critical Voices: From Local to Global” speaker series, such as Jim Goldston, Opal Tometti, Maya Foa, and Nicole Austin-Hillery, provided students with additional inspiration and ways to think about the power of movement building and strategic litigation.
Sorensen Center Fellow Ashley Franklin with 2019 Scholar-in-Residence Maina Kiai and Executive Director of the Open Society Justice Initiative Jim Goldston at a Sorensen Center “Critical Voices” discussion with students about the value of strategic litigation amidst rising illiberal democracies
“Human rights are too often viewed as an international concept,” said Daniel Peña, an inaugural Greene Foundation-funded Fellow. “The great thing about the Sorensen Center’s focus on local as well as global is its spotlight on domestic issues as human rights issues as they should be. To be a Fellow at the Sorensen Center for International Peace and Justice doing this work at home helps shift the narrative.”
This generation of social social lawyers, working in their own communities with innovative connections to other communities around the world, are helping to shape our future.