Studying the law means gaining access to powerful tools to advocate for justice and challenge structural inequity. But aspiring attorneys from communities most impacted by injustice—including Black, Latinx, and low-income people—experience significant financial and professional barriers to entering and advancing in the field. With AWB’s support, we’ll increase the accessibility and inclusiveness of our Law Clerk program to actively recruit and support diverse emerging attorneys. Our Law Clerk program trains the next generation of intersectional gender justice advocates, providing rigorous hands-on legal experience as well as extensive mentorship, education, and career development. AWB funding will help us launch a new phase of this program to fill the urgent, outstanding need in the field of public interest law to cultivate and empower law students from communities underrepresented in the legal profession.

Our Law Clerk program will tackle this need in two ways:

1) Program recruitment outreach that actively targets candidates from Black, Latinx, and low-income communities. We’ll reach out to HBCUs with law schools, schools with Critical Race Theory programs, and bar associations supporting people of color. We’ll also actively reach out to affinity groups for law students of color and other communities underrepresented in the field.

2) Robust program resources and mentorship to kickstart and sustain participants’ long term career development. We’ll expand our training program with a series of on-demand webinars and comprehensive binder of educational resources for clerks to use during and beyond the program. We’ll also expand our Law Clerk Alumni Program, which builds on our targeted outreach to diverse emerging attorneys by providing ongoing support, mentorship, and professional development to help them succeed in their chosen field of law.

We are also applying to the Awesome Foundation - SF Chapter to support this project.