Improving workplace conditions for low-income immigrant women

Fellowship gives law school graduate the chance to make a difference

Risha Foulkes already had one graduate degree and a flourishing career when she decided she could do more to help others if she went to law school.

Exactly when the realization struck, Foulkes can no longer recall. But she remembers vividly what she was doing. Foulkes, who was out of college and working for a nonprofit, had been volunteering evenings as an English teacher for an organization serving Mexican immigrants. Her classroom was a dismal basement kitchen in Manhattan.

“It was the middle of the summer. There was no air conditioning and no window. There was paint peeling on the walls, and a gas leak, and a pregnant woman in my class,” Foulkes recalls. “I thought, ‘I love teaching this class, but I know I can do more.’ I wanted to be able to address all the struggles my students dealt with, on a daily basis, to survive.”

Come September, she will.

Foulkes, 31, a full-tuition Dean’s Merit scholarship student who graduated from Rutgers School of Law–Newark May 23, has been named a 2008 Skadden Fellow by the Skadden Fellowship Foundation. She is one of only 35 graduating law students across the country to receive a Skadden fellowship, which will pay their salaries for two years while they pursue public-interest law projects of their own design.

Foulkes’ undertaking, to be carried out at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, is to improve workplace health and safety for low-income immigrant women working in unregulated agricultural and nail salon jobs in New York and New Jersey. Both farmworkers and nail salon technicians handle chemicals that may be carcinogens or reproductive toxins, harmful to themselves or their children, according to her project proposal.

For Foulkes, the fellowship is one more opportunity to work on behalf of the poor and underrepresented, something she’s been doing for most of her adult life. A stellar student, fluent in Spanish since college, she grew up near Springfield, Massachusetts, as the child of two social workers who introduced their four children early to a world of “haves and have-nots.”

Foulkes pitched in when her parents helped out at a local food pantry, baking brownies or corn bread. She also met some of her parents’ clients.

By the time she was out of college, she had taught summer school for kids from Vietnamese and Puerto Rican migrant families, worked with battered Latina women, and researched domestic violence resources for Ukrainian immigrants. She had also worked at a paper factory, a pizza joint, and a truck stop to earn tuition.

Foulkes received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago, where she majored in cultural anthropology, and her master’s in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge, England. Foulkes then went to work for the New York Association for New Americans and, later, the Guttmacher Institute.

Once Foulkes made up her mind to be a lawyer, it did not take her long to discover Rutgers. “Rutgers is an incredibly supportive environment for public interest law, and it provides affordable tuition and scholarships,” she said. “I wanted to make sure I could work in a non-profit organization when I graduated.”

While in law school she was an editor of the Rutgers Race & The Law Review, a co-founder of the Human Rights Forum, and a fellow at Rutgers’ Eagleton Institute of Politics. Foulkes also spent months refining a student article for the Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy. Her article, “Abstinence-Only Education and Minority Teenagers: The Importance of Race in a Question of Constitutionality” was published last month.

In the article, Foulkes analyzes the federal government’s funding of “abstinence-only” sex education, taught in many low-income public school districts as the only way to avoid pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases. She argues that the curriculum violates the protections of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, discriminates against gay and lesbian students, and widens the “divide in sex and reproductive health knowledge” between minority and white teens.

Despite having published an original scholarly work, an unusual feat for a student, Foulkes is not focused on a career of teaching law. At least, not yet.

“I think it’s too early to say. I could never go straight into teaching. I can’t wait to get back into the real world and work with clients,” she said. “Some people may think it’s depressing to work with people who are exploited. For me, it’s really inspiring, to work with immigrants who have the courage to speak out, when they face so much intimidation. They’re amazing.”