Echoing Green Fellowship Will Help CALA Expand the Availability of Free Legal Services and Activism to Underserved Clients, Including Undocumented Immigrants, Sex Workers, and Day Laborers.
Global nonprofit Echoing Green announced last week that CALA has been awarded a highly competitive and prestigious Global Fellowship to help develop the Community Activism Law Alliance (CALA). The Fellowship will provide seed funding, mentoring and leadership opportunities as the organization unites lawyers, communities and activists to bring free legal services directly into the communities that need them the most.
Ellen Craig, President of CALA’s Board of Directors, remarked, “CALA's staff, community partners and Board of Directors are very pleased that Echoing Green, an internationally-recognized nonprofit that is building a global community of emerging leaders in social change, has awarded one of its coveted Global Fellowships to Lam Ho, CALA's founder and Executive Director. We appreciate Echoing Green's generous support which will enable CALA to continue to provide our underserved communities access to justice and to pursue social change in collaboration with our community partners.”
Of 3,629 applicants, 52—just over one percent—were selected to receive Fellowships. Through three Fellowship categories (Global, Climate and Black Male Achievement), Echoing Green has invested almost $40 million in seed-stage funding and strategic assistance to nearly 700 world-class leaders. Echoing Green also supports the Fellow community long after their initial funding period through ongoing programs and opportunities at critical points in their careers.
CALA will receive $80,000 in funding for two years, participate in leadership development events, receive mentoring from leading business professionals and, most importantly, become part of a global network of leaders.
“We’re proud to be investing in tomorrow’s leaders, helping them go further, faster, as they realize their vision of a world changed for the better,” said Echoing Green President Dr. Cheryl Dorsey. “Many of the Fellows chosen are leading projects in the earliest stages, when it is hardest to find the necessary resources to get off the ground.”
Echoing Green’s Fellowship program is made possible through private contributions and the generous support of funders, including the Walton Family Foundation, the U.S. Global Development Lab of USAID, the Jerome L. Greene Foundation, The ZOOM Foundation, and the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, with support from the Open Society Foundations.
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About the Community Activism Law Alliance:
Community Activism Law Alliance (CALA) uses a model of community activism lawyering to unite lawyers and activists to collaboratively help underserved communities access justice and pursue social change. Through these partnerships, CALA creates activism-law clinics within and by Chicago communities with the highest rates of poverty and crime. They provide free legal services to undocumented immigrants, laborers, and sex workers, while supporting their partners’ grassroots activism for greater, empowered, and more durable impact than what lawyers, and the law, alone could achieve. CALA hopes to change how attorneys and activists nationwide work for and with communities. CALA currently operates 4 free community activism law clinics on the west and south sides of Chicago.
Learn More: www.calachicago.org
About Echoing Green:
Echoing Green’s mission is to unleash next generation talent to solve the world's biggest problems. Echoing Green was one of the first organizations to invest in early-stage social entrepreneurs through our Fellowship program almost 30 years ago. Today, the organization remains focused on building a global community of emerging leaders in social change. To date, the organization has supported almost 700 organizations led by the most extraordinary purpose-driven leaders of our time. Echoing Green Fellows include the founders of Teach For America, City Year, One Acre Fund, The Global Fund for Children and SKS Microfinance. Echoing Green’s accelerator programming and investments help these leaders to go further, faster. Echoing Green also runs a suite of innovative programs that cultivate and support promising leaders, including programming dedicated to purpose development, board leader preparation, and impact investing.
Learn More: echoinggreen.org
