I am so grateful to Equal Justice America for sponsoring the Brian Lewinstein Youth Justice Fellowship which will allow me to begin my post-graduate career as a youth advocate and community lawyer. I am thrilled with the opportunity to continue the work I began at the East Bay Community Law Center (“EBCLC”) as a clinical law student during my final two years of law school.

When I joined EBCLC’s Education Justice Clinic at the start my second year of law school, I immediately felt that I had found the work I came to law school to do. Several years prior, as an undergraduate studying education policy, I did a summer internship with the youth policy director of the ACLU of Washington. During that internship I witnessed my first example of a community lawyer when my supervisor (an attorney) took me to a grassroots meeting with a group of families of children with disabilities. She showed me what it meant to support, rather than take over their work to make changes within their own community. I knew I wanted to be that kind of advocate, who showed up to listen and support the communities I serve.

Within EBCLC’s Education Justice and Youth Defense clinics (“EDJY”) in law school, I again found attorneys who approach the law by centering their clients and communities. During my first year with the clinic, I learned to let the goals and needs the young people I helped represent guide my own work. By supporting young people through expulsion cases and in seeking disability accommodations in school, I witnessed the barriers our education and youth criminal systems pose to the pursuit of those goals. My clients faced discrimination in their schools and communities on a regular basis because of their race and disabilities. They faced schools unwilling to provide them the support they needed to succeed and which too often criminalized them. By seeking to ensure that their voices, experiences, needs, and goals were heard in spaces where people so often spoke about them instead of with them, I helped them to break down some of those barriers. However, I also knew that I wanted to be part of a movement for more systemic change.

As a result, I returned for a second year with clinic to work on a more targeted set of projects focused on building relationships with community organizations and advocates. There are arguably not enough lawyers to meet the need for direct services for young people facing incarceration or obstacles to their access to education. However, there are many community organizations and youth, parent, and family organizers rising to fill that gap and pushing for systemic change that would lessen or eliminate that need. Youth and their communities who are most directly impacted by the school-to-prison pipeline are also best placed to lead the work to end it. EDJY has given me the opportunity this year to reach out to and hear from these advocates and create know-your-rights and advocacy trainings to support their work.

EDJY has been foundational to my experience of law school. The clinic taught me both skills critical to being a lawyer but also how to put my values into practice in order to be the type of lawyer I want to be. I am beyond excited to continue to build on my community lawyering work and to return to client-centered direct services for the next two years as a Brian Lewinstein Youth Justice fellow. I am so grateful to Equal Justice America for giving me the opportunity to support communities seeking systemic change and abolition of the school-to-prison pipeline and to use direct representation to help young people harmed by that pipeline in the interim.