Make the Road New York
Legal Department
Brooklyn, NY
Make the Road New York has worked in New York's immigrant communities for more than fifteen years. MRNY formed as a merger of Make the Road By Walking, a community-based membership organization in Brooklyn founded by two recent law grads, and the Latin American Integration Center, a civic participation organization founded in Queens by Columbian immigrants.
MRNY builds the power of Latino and working class communities to achieve dignity and justice through organizing, policy innovation, transformative education, and survival services. With nearly 10,000 members - primarily low-income Latino immigrants - and community centers in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Long Island, MRNY organizes around the issues most pressing for the communities we serve: workplace justice, tenants' rights, immigrant civil rights, LGBT rights, youth power, health care access, and public education. Our Legal Department, with 7 lawyers and 9 advocates, handles the range of civil legal needs of our members. We have specialized in employment legal services for more than a decade, in particular focusing on fighting wage theft.
MRNY seeks a Peggy Browning Fellow to join our workplace justice team, an integrated team of community organizers and lawyers working on the front lines with immigrant workers facing exploitation on the job. The Fellow will have the opportunity both to develop key advocacy skills (client interviewing, litigation, policy, and research skills), while also working closely with our organizers to envision, develop, and run campaigns designed to improve working conditions for low-wage workers. Make the Road focuses in particular on combatting wage theft among workers, including running campaigns against employers as well as legal advocacy to recover unpaid wages.
The Fellow will have the opportunity to collaborate with key government agencies, including the New York Department of Labor and the New York Attorney General. The Fellow will interview workers to identify legal claims, partner with their supervising attorney to develop an advocacy strategy, and more forward with cases. The Fellow will be exposed to the range of legal work, from direct negotiation to settle cases to administrative complaint to federal litigation. The Fellow will also have a chance to work on policy campaigns, including legislative campaigns to pass Paid Sick Leave and to regulate big box retailers like Walmart. The Fellow should be bilingual in Spanish and English to facilitate meaningful client contact.
The Fellow will meet the range of MRNY partners in the workplace justice field, including other legal services providers engaged in employment work (at a monthly Task Force meeting), government allies, national policy organizations, and other community-based groups advocating for workers. All summer interns receive intensive in-house training on the substantive issues they work on.
The total ten-week stipend for this fellowship will be $4,500.
Address cover letter to:
Magdalena Barbosa, Supervising Attorney
Make the Road New York
92-10 Roosevelt Avenue
Queens, NY 11372
www.maketheroadny.org
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