Make the Road New York

Legal Department
New York area (Brooklyn, Queens or White Plains),, NY

This is the 2025 fellowship description for this mentor organization.

Make the Road New York (MRNY) is a grassroots organization that builds the power of immigrant and working-class communities to achieve dignity and justice through organizing, policy innovation, transformative education, and survival services, which includes legal services. With nearly 25,000 members - primarily low-income Latinx immigrants - and community centers in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Long Island, and Westchester, MRNY organizes around the issues most pressing for the communities we serve: workplace justice, tenants’ rights, immigrant civil rights, transgender, gender nonconforming, intersex, and queer (TGNCIQ rights, youth power, health care access, and public education. Our Legal Department, which consists of more than 40 attorneys, paralegals and advocates, provides a range of civil legal services in the areas of employment law, immigration law, housing and public benefits, TGNCIQ rights, and health. We have specialized in workplace justice legal services for more than a decade, developing expertise in combatting systemic wage theft and workplace discrimination.

MRNY seeks a Peggy Browning Fellow to join our Workplace Justice team, an integrated team of lawyers, advocates and community organizers working on the front lines with immigrant workers facing exploitation on the job. The Fellow will have the opportunity to develop key advocacy skills (client interviewing, legal research, policy, and litigation), while also working closely with our organizers to support campaigns designed to improve working conditions for low-wage workers. Make the Road NY focuses in particular on combatting wage theft among workers, including running campaigns tostrengthen protections and enforcement as well as legal advocacy to recover unpaid wages.

The Fellow will interview workers to identify legal claims and work with their supervising attorneys to develop an advocacy strategy and move forward with individual and group client cases. The Fellow will have the opportunity to perform a wide range of legal work, from intake with workers, direct negotiation to settle cases, administrative complaints, to litigation in federal court and collaborating with key government agencies that enforce labor laws in New York. The Fellow will also have a chance to work on policy campaigns, including legislative campaigns to improve protections for workers in New York. The Fellow should be bilingual in Spanish and English to facilitate meaningful client contact.

The Fellow will meet the range of MRNY partners in the workplace justice field, including other legal services providers engaged in employment work, government allies, national policy organizations, and other community-based groups advocating for workers. All summer interns receive intensive in-house training on the substantive issues they work on.

Make the Road New York is currently operating in a hybrid of in-person and remote work, but summer interns will be expected to be available as needed for in-person meetings at the primary office where they are assigned throughout the summer. We will be able to provide more information on work arrangements as the summer approaches.

The total ten-week stipend for this fellowship will be $7,000.

Address cover letter to:

Make the Road New York
ATTN: Nathalia Alejandra Varela
Supervising Attorney of the Workplace Justice Project
92-10 Roosevelt Avenue
Jackson Heights, NY 11372