News & Stories

Many of the insights that guided Sheerine Alemzadeh’s (’11) vision for Healing to Action (HTA) — a Chicago-based nonprofit she cofounded that empowers survivors of gender-based violence to develop and lead community-organizing campaigns — were sparked by her experiences as a Skadden Fellow.

In April and May 2020, the Skadden Foundation awarded $10,000 Flom Incubator Grants to 28 former Fellows to support their work addressing critical legal needs amplified by the pandemic. The distribution marks an expansion of the existing FIG program, which has awarded more than 140 grants to support innovative legal projects by former Fellows since 2011.

The COVID grant recipients have taken on a variety of legal issues related to housing, domestic violence, education, juvenile detention and other matters impacting low-income communities and vulnerable populations. We spoke with two recipients, Nisha Kashyap and Charlotte Tsui, about their projects.

As a Skadden Fellow, Toby Merrill (’12) founded the Project on Predatory Student Lending (PPSL) at Harvard Law School’s Legal Services Center, where she continues to serve as the project’s director. PPSL seeks to represent students in cases challenging the fraud perpetrated by for-profit colleges, such as false advertising and job-placement claims, that lures borrowers into spending tens of thousands of dollars for often-worthless degrees.