The Initiative for Community Power designs and leads courses on social justice, and creates and supports student fellowships to work with organizations, and on academic projects, challenging inequality. We also offer resources about movement lawyering, community organizing, and social change and build and sustain partnerships with social justice organizations and create community among faculty, students and leading social justice practitioners.
Courses, Externships, and Clinics
Law and Power
Law and Power is a new, 14 credit seminar and externship led by Andrew Friedman, offered at the Law School through the Pro Bono Scholars Program. This course includes a seminar component and fieldwork at social justice partner organizations that organize with, and represent, indigent clients. In Spring 2024, the externship program catalyzed over 8,000 hours of fieldwork!
The seminar focuses on an exploration of what it means to be a lawyer working for racial and economic justice. In the course, students explore different conceptions of social justice lawyering, and the tensions among them, as well as a range of materials, workshops, discussions and simulations designed to help students engage with philosophical and practical questions about lawyering and the myriad roles lawyers can play in social movements. Additionally, students dig into questions about social change dynamics: the dynamics of movement moments and uprisings, the role of structured organizations, and what is involved in building people’s organizations with the capacity to secure meaningful social change. Students get an introduction to different roles attorneys can play in social change work and meet a number of attorneys and organizers with different experiences of social change work and lawyering. Students also delve into practical questions and skill development activities to help build their capacity and efficacy as agents for change.
Law and Community Organizing Lab
Led by Andew Friedman, ICP has launched a first-of-its-kind Law and Community Organizing Lab within NYU Law’s Clinical Program to help advise, coach and support clinical faculty and students to develop and deploy a sophisticated understanding of organizing, social change and campaigning, and to build out a dynamic organizing team to provide capacity to NYU’s clinics on power-building, coalitional and campaigning work.
Training Academies & Efforts to Strengthen Legal Education
Annual Law and Organizing Academy
As part of ICP’s commitment to facilitating and nurturing the next generation of innovative movement lawyers, starting in 2022, ICP has organized an annual Law & Organizing Academy (LOA) that brings law students together to dream big and equip them with the necessary tools to be agents of positive social change. The LOA has trained more than 110 rising second- and third-year law students and introduced them to critical organizing and Law and Political Economy frameworks.
The Law and Organizing Academy is a partnership between the NYU Initiative for Community Power, the Action Lab, and, previously the Law & Political Economy Project, along with a range of frontline social justice organizations, such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, VOCAL NY, Make the Road NY and NJ, TakeRoot Justice and the Safety Net Project.
To learn more please check out the 2023 Program and 2024 Program.
The Summer Organizing Training Camp
ICP hosts a Summer Organizing Training Camp for public policy and college students that includes field-based organizing practice with partner base-building organizations
Law and Organizing in Law Schools
As part of ICP’s commitment to strengthening legal education and the development of the next generation of social justice lawyers, ICP is facilitating collaboration among doctrinal and clinical professors from around the country to discuss current efforts and possible interventions to train aspiring lawyers to more effectively catalyze change and build power for working-class and marginalized communities.