Prof. Brian Glick
Clinical Associate Professor of Law, Community Economic Development Clinic
Gowri Krishna
Clinical Teaching Fellow
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Following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, the Clinic worked with displaced restaurant workers from Windows on the World to form Colors, a worker-owned restaurant as pictured above. For more information and video, click here. |
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FORDHAM'S Community Economic Development Clinic represents groups fighting for social justice in low-income communities and low-wage workforces. As general counsel, the Clinic helps to sustain effective organizations and build institutions -- childcare centers, health clinics, workers centers, co-ops-- that empower participants while providing desperately needed services and opportunities. It supports local efforts to shape development, limit gentrification and win community benefits agreements. It helps small grassroots groups to incorporate, write bylaws and obtain tax exemption.
You will learn basic skills of transactional business lawyering in a nonprofit social justice setting. You take charge of work for non-profit start-ups and join teams with faculty and outside counsel for major projects. You meet with clients and present to their members. You interview, counsel, negotiate, advocate, mediate, facilitate, and organize. You write legal documents, policy papers and community legal educational materials. You learn to collaborate with each other and with clients, community activists, and other lawyers.
The Clinic helps its graduates get public interest jobs and fellowships or do pro bono work at law firms. Some return to co-counsel Clinic projects and teach Clinic classes. One former student was recently selected to found a new CED Clinic at CUNY Law School. Another is now co-teaching our CED Clinic.
Current projects include:
- Researching, structuring and drafting agreements between the Restaurant Opportunities Center-United (ROC-United), a national federation of local restaurant workers' organizations, and affiliates nationwide.
- Counseling a group of women in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, on how to set up and structure a worker cooperative providing care to elderly persons.
- Working to structure the internal governance of a cooperatively-owned grocery store that will provide affordable and sustainable food options in Queens and community education about nutrition and the food industry.
- Negotiating and drafting agreements between an organization in the Bronx that provides access to affordable consumer credit and small business planning and its partners.
- Assisting Colors, a local worker co-op restaurant, which our Clinic helped to form, in a process of re-designing its internal structure and operating procedures.
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