It is through the generous support of Equal Justice America’s Brian Lewinstein Fellowship that I am beginning my career as an attorney working at East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC) providing aid to transitional age youth. By working with the Education Justice and Youth Defense (EDJY) unit, I will be engaging my legal education to intervene in the school-to-prison pipeline that harms kids in our communities.
Prior to law school, working as an investigator at a public defender’s office, I witnessed how a composition of vulnerabilities tipped the scales of justice against those my office represented before any official adjudication proceedings had begun. People were brought into the criminal system saddled with intersecting vulnerabilities—poverty, race-based stereotypes, mental health concerns, trauma, uncertain immigration status—vulnerabilities that were rarely addressed and even less frequently considered as mitigating factors to the circumstances that placed them within the criminal system. As a non-attorney advocate, I struggled to reconcile the law on the books and how the law was applied to marginalized clients.
Despite my desire to intervene in these situations, it wasn’t until I was in law school and spent my 1L summer with EBCLC’s Clean Slate Unit that I learned what it meant to intervene as a community lawyer and learned where my add-in was helpful in the community-wide creation of justice. These early experiences with EBCLC proved transformative of the rest of my law school trajectory. Both my human rights work and my education advocacy work were continuously inspired by EBCLC’s powerful examples of community lawyering and community-oriented solutions.
Throughout law school, I strengthened my dedication to using education as a tool for building justice. While teaching at Mount Tamalpais College (MTC), a college within San Quentin State Prison, every class session brought home how access to education, particularly one that is responsive to students’ needs, remains an unfulfilled guarantee in California, and the rest of the country more broadly. While there is great diversity of educational achievement among MTC’s students, it was not uncommon that MTC’s resources to promote learning and respond to individual learning needs often represented the first time students had felt supported in an educational setting, raising questions of students’ access to inclusive and responsive education during their youth.
My fellowship within EDJY therefore represents a new point of intervention in my legal advocacy, one where I will be able to directly intervene and interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline and work to ensure that kids and transitional age youth are being advocated for through a holistic and individualized approach. I look forward to spending the next two years working among passionate and skilled advocates to guarantee that the youth in our communities can remain safe, supported, and free.
I’m deeply grateful to Equal Justice America for sponsoring the Brian Lewinstein Youth Justice Fellowship, enabling me to continue the community-centered advocacy that led me to law school. I’m honored to join the incredible staff, legal advocates, and community partners at the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC) to advance justice through grassroots collaboration. I am excited to contribute to supporting young people and building stronger communities
