Director
Andrew Friedman is founding director of the Initiative for Community Power at NYU School of Law. The Initiative is an ambitious, multi-faceted effort to combine the weight and assets of a global academic institution with the nimble, community-grounded tools of advocacy and organizing. Its goal is to catalyze understanding, innovation, and high-impact work in order to accelerate social change towards a more equitable, democratic, and racially just society. The Initiative combines scholarship, field-building, experiential education, academic convenings, internships and fellowships to examine inequality and anti-democracy, and the links between the two. The Initiative works to challenge and disrupt both. Andrew comes to the Initiative after decades of work founding and leading some of the highest impact base-building organizations in the United States, such as Make the Road New York and the Center for Popular Democracy.
Senior Fellows
Daniela Tagtachian is a poverty lawyer and a sociology PhD student at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She received her BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2012 and her JD from the University of Michigan Law School in 2016. Prior to joining CUNY, she was a Mysun Foundation Fellow and a lecturer-in-law at the University of Miami School of Law Environmental Justice Clinic. While there, as a community lawyer, she focused on empowering minority communities and addressing systemic inequity through projects such as the development of anti-displacement strategies. As a doctoral student, her research interests include municipal equity and the empowerment of minority communities, legal estrangement, inclusion/exclusion through civic engagement, structural inequity, the role of law in the perpetuation of inequality, social justice, and theories of social change.
John Whitlow is an associate professor at the CUNY School of Law, where he co-directs the Community and Economic Development Clinic. Prior to joining CUNY’s faculty, John was an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law. Before entering academia, John was a supervising attorney at Make the Road New York and a staff attorney at the Urban Justice Center’s Community Development Project. John holds a BA from the Johns Hopkins University, an MA from the New School for Social Research, and a JD from the CUNY School of Law. He has been a fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and was the Inaugural Faculty Fellow at Yale Law School’s Law and Political Economy Project.
Kumar Rao is a social justice lawyer with years of experience partnering with grassroots organizations and elected officials in the fight to strengthen our democracy, and for racial and economic justice at the local, state, and federal levels. Previously, he served in senior policy, political, and strategy roles at the Working Families Party and the Center for Popular Democracy. Kumar is also a scholar with the Institute for Social Policy & Understanding, for whom he led a major study into the disparate legal and media treatment that suspects of ideological violence receive based on their perceived racial and religious identity. A former litigator and public defender, he has also represented thousands of clients in state and federal court, in both criminal and civil matters, and has counseled defender offices in the United States and globally on the delivery of legal services and effective client representation practices. Kumar holds a JD cum laude from New York University School of Law and a BBA with honors from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.