News & Stories

Estella Cisneros (’12), the legal director of California Rural Legal Assistance’s Agricultural Worker Program, grew up in Planada, California, in the heart of the Central Valley. Nearly 95% of the town’s 4,000 residents are Latino, and the majority — including Estella’s parents, who immigrated from central Mexico — work in some type of agriculture, including on large-scale farms.

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.