Level Up
Housing Justice Fellowship
Level Up is an 8-month fellowship for lawyers and organizers advancing housing justice in low-income communities in the southern region of the United States.
At Movement Law Lab, we believe that leaders across social movements know that now is the time to level up and move beyond short-term, defensive fights. It is time to lay the groundwork for more transformative and ambitious legal, policy, and organizing campaigns. New moments require new approaches to trusted tactics and re-imagined strategies.
After two years of a pandemic-fueled eviction crisis, rising rent prices, growing inflation, and an affordable housing shortage, the 44 million United States households who rent, and the 11 million who pay more than half of their monthly income to landlords and corporations, are facing unprecedented challenges. Tenant leaders, organizers and lawyers across the country are joining forces to lay the groundwork for more transformative and ambitious legal, policy, and organizing campaigns to protect working-class renters. As part of our partnership with the Right to the City Alliance we have launched the Level Up Housing Justice Fellowship.
Level Up is an 8-month fellowship for law and organizing pairs advancing housing justice in low-income communities, specifically Black, Indigenous or other communities of color, immigrant communities, or low-income white communities, in the South/Southeast region of the United States. Our choice was driven by a realization that low-income southern communities have been the hardest hit by the recent pandemic, economic downturn, and underemployment crisis. But more than that, we understood that building up the strategic legal and organizing capacities inside those very communities is the best way to discover ways of holistically transforming our country's relationship with commodified land and housing.
The Level Up fellowship gives the organizer and lawyer pairs space to assess the present housing conditions in their region and seed new, imaginative and impactful solutions that can build working-class tenant power.
Fellows participate in a monthly session featuring a range of substantive topics including models for mass eviction defense, state-law preemption of local tenants’ rights, rent control, running movement centered campaigns, and building strategic partnerships between organizers and lawyers.
Fellows began their 8 month fellowship with a 4-day opening retreat in Atlanta, Georgia focusing on strengthening their partnership work, beginning assessments of the conditions for working class people in their areas and designing transformative goals for the future.
Baltimore, Maryland - anneke dunbar-gronke (Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights); Detrese Dowridge (Baltimore Renters United)
Charlotte, North Carolina - Apryl Lewis (Action NC); Ismaail Qaiyim (Queen Community Law Firm)
Miami, Florida - Denise Ghartey (Community Justice Project); Zaina Alsous (Miami Workers Center)
Miami, Florida - Berbeth Foster (Community Justice Project); Bertisha Combs (Florida Rising)
Morgantown, West Virginia - Loree Stark (ACLU of West Virginia); Brian Butcher (Morgantown City Council)
Richmond, Virginia - Elena Camacho (New Virginia Majority); Michaela Ross (Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP)
Charlottesville, Virginia - Gustavo Espinosa (Legal Aid Justice Center); Moriah J Wilkins (Legal Aid Justice Center)
Athens, Georgia - Jessica Martinez (Athens Housing Advocacy Team); Sarah Gehring (Gehring at Law)
New Orleans, Louisiana - Kimberly Diaz (Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Project); Tania Murillo (Southeast Louisiana Legal Services)
Madison County, Kentucky - Margaret Sites (AppalReD Legal Aid); Michael Harrington (Southern Crossroads)
