“I worked at the Community Empowerment Fund my sophomore fall and through the rest of Duke. Early in my experience there I started working with members of the community who were facing obstacles because of a prior interaction with the criminal justice system. This charge could be from 7 – 10 years ago and yet it was preventing them from finding employment, finding housing, all of these repercussions that in my view were unfair. I became serious about not just advocating for change in that arena but studying and understanding it on a more academic level.
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The summer after sophomore year I worked at Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, Alabama and it was amazing. I was working with Teaching Tolerance, the branch of SPLC that works directly with educators. They track hate incidents in K-12 schools, they provide a magazine for teachers who are social justice oriented so they can bring these materials into the classroom. To see them in action gave me a better understanding of how you go about nonprofit change from different angles and that was really useful.” – Leah Abrams PPS ’20 #PPS #PubPol2020 #Duke2020
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Photos in order: (1) Leah presenting her honors thesis researching automatic criminal record expungement and racial discrimination in job hiring (2) Leah presenting on speechwriting (3) Young Leah with Obama at a 2012 canvassing event in Carrboro