From coal plants to large-scale agriculture, industrial activities contributing to the environmental crisis tend to concentrate in minority communities with little power, wealth, or legal knowledge to defend themselves. The consequences to health and livelihoods are frequently devastating. To help them protect themselves, the nonprofit Namati trains paralegals to educate and organize ordinary citizens to fight for justice within the legal system and change the laws that threaten their well-being.
This episode tells the story of Namati and founder Vivek Maru’s lifelong campaign to give the vulnerable a voice in the legal systems that impact their lives. Now, as climate change exacerbates nearly every form of social injustice, Namati is doubling down on the threats to land and environmental rights by forming a coordinated movement of environmental justice organizations around the world. This episode:
- begins with a landmark land-grab case in Sierra Leone that illustrates the power of a community exercising its rights (0:06);
- explains how years of deep experience in individual cases can lead to systemic changes in laws that benefit entire societies (07:21);
- traces Maru’s personal history from the influence of his grandfather, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, through his college studies of the social movements of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X (09:00);
- describes the origins of the Namati strategy in 1950s South Africa (11:52) and Maru’s first experience in combining law and community organizing in Sierra Leone (12:47);
- chronicles the work of Namati on abuses of land, citizenship, and other rights from Myanmar to Kenya, and the formation of an international network of justice empowerment organizations (16:47);
- highlights Namati’s plans to turbo-charge its response to land and environmental abuses (22:05); and
- how Namati is now transferring its experience in developing countries back home to address environmental injustices in the United States (26:18).
Additional Resources:
Source articles for this episode include:
- Justice for All, the report of the Task Force on Justice, details the “justice gap” around the world.
- The Impact of Legal Empowerment on Barriers to Health Care describes Namati’s impact on health care rights in Mozambique.
- Justice and Identity in Kibera chronicles the efforts of paralegals to win Kenyan citizenship for the Nubian minority.
- The Escazú Agreement about the landmark regional treaty for environmental defenders.
- The Justice Gap Report of the Legal Services Corp. details the lack of access to justice in the United States.
- Financing People-Centered Justice in Africa unveils plans for the new Grassroots Legal Empowerment Fund.
The full transcript of the episode is below.
* * *
Jonathan Levine 00:06
The people of the Nimiyama Chiefdom in Sierra Leone have known a lot of hardship over the years: a brutal civil war in the 1990s, and the violence of illicit trade in blood diamonds. But nothing prepared them for that morning in 2013. Farmers in five villages woke up to the sound of bulldozers wrecking their fields and erecting large concrete barriers. They were told the leader of the region, the Paramount Chief, had sold their land to a Chinese rubber company. This land had been in their families for generations, and no one had asked their permission to sell it.
Idrissa Boima 00:43
It caused a lot of hardship. Landowners and the families survive through that land.
Jonathan Levine 00:48
That's Idrissa Boima, one of the landowners. He and other farmers protested the sale, but the chiefs refused to listen.
Idrissa Boima 00:56
We complained. We first asked them, they told us that we are cockroach and aratas—rats! We don't have the right to ask them.
Jonathan Levine 01:04
A few courageous people spoke out publicly against the deal. But the chief sent police to threaten and beat them.
Idrissa Boima 01:10
They intimidated me. They wound me.
Jonathan Levine 01:12
Some of the landowners went to the capitol in Freetown to petition a government minister, but the minister did nothing.
Idrissa Boima 01:19
It is very difficult at that time. Because can you imagine? Our main source of income is rice farming. But if there is no rice, we just managed to feed the family by any way. We feel pretty helpless.
Jonathan Levine 01:33
That's when they turned to a courageous group of local paralegals for help.
Jonathan Levine 01:42
From the Stanford Social Innovation Review at Stanford University, this is Uncharted Ground: stories about the people at the forefront of global development and their journeys in social innovation. I'm Jonathan Levine. Every year land grabs like Nimiyama play out around the world, as powerful business interests and corrupt politicians exploit vulnerable communities. Five billion people live without basic protection of the law. In many cases, that's because governments simply fail to enforce rules on the books. And most people don't protest because they either don't know their rights or have no access to a lawyer—or can't afford one. Of course, land grabs aren't the only problem. Industrial polluters regularly harm the health and livelihoods of nearby communities—among a litany of other injustices. Social activists have been fighting the good fight for decades, one case, one community, one country at a time. But a network of grassroots advocates is starting to lean into a globally connected movement of change. If they're successful, they may one day have the legal firepower to meet their adversaries head on.
Vivek Maru 03:00
The powerful interests that we are taking on—the fossil fuel industry, the corporations that are destroying forests, that are violating people's rights—those interests are working across borders pretty well. And they have been for a long time. And in order for us to win, we need to do the same.
Jonathan Levine 03:16
That's Vivek Maru, the founder and CEO of Namati. It's a legal empowerment organization dedicated to what may be one of the few strategies scalable enough to confront the magnitude of injustice around the world. They empower people with knowledge of the law, and then help them use it to fight their own fights.
Vivek Maru 03:37
Ordinary people don't have guns, we don't have money. Law is one of the few things we have that can constrain power, that can guarantee equal protection. So our goal is to turn that dynamic upside down by equipping ordinary people with the power to know law, use law and shape law.
Jonathan Levine 03:57
At the heart of that strategy are people like Hassan Sesay.
Hassan Sesay 04:00
I'm a community paralegal working in Sierra Leone.
Jonathan Levine 04:04
He's one of a few hundred paralegals Namati has deployed in grassroots communities across a half-dozen countries. These barefoot lawyers, as they're sometimes called, are not accredited attorneys. But what they do have is just enough training in laws and regulations to educate fellow citizens about their rights—and the courage to defend them. A case in point: the Nimiyama land grab. Hassan picks up the story from here.
Hassan Sesay 04:34
When the people came to Namati, we tried to intervene with the chief and the company. But the chief believed he had the right to sell the land and refused to discuss it. And the people—they felt threatened.
Jonathan Levine 04:48
Here again is Idrissa Boima, one of the landowners.
Idrissa Boima 04:51
They told us that whosoever stands their way, they will bulldoze you with their bulldozers that are coming to work on this land. A lot of people feel frightened. Some of the villagers became afraid.
Hassan Sesay 05:03
As a last resort, we filed a lawsuit in high court against the chief and company to try to win back the land. The process took nearly three years. During that time, many families were displaced and the villages were deserted. But in February of 2016, the court ruled in favor of the families. It restored the land to its rightful owners and awarded damages for the destruction of their crops and lost income.
Jonathan Levine 05:36
But even more important was the precedent this case set. No one had ever challenged a Paramount Chief in court, much less won, and no land grab had ever been reversed at this scale. The verdict put foreign investors and local powers on notice. And it made news around the world.
BBC News 05:54
The high courts ruled that the land rights of over 70 families were violated when the chiefs in the area …
Idrissa Boima 06:00
I was one of the happiest man on Earth that day. Because I feel relief, and I feel that justice has been done. I know and I believe that nobody has to take law by itself from your hand. You have to go through the due legal process of law. And that's what we did.
Jonathan Levine 06:19
The Nimiyama case stands out as a classic among Namati’s victories around the world, but it's only part of a bigger story. In fact, it's one of thousands of land and environmental cases that have roiled Sierra Leone over the past 20 years. Since the country's civil war ended in 2001, the government has aggressively lured foreign investments as a strategy to pull the country out of poverty. And Sierra Leone's legendary resources—diamonds, iron ore, bauxite, palm oil–have been a colossal draw. That's where the problems start.
Sonkita Conteh 06:52
We've seen a number of deaths and violence against communities who have dared to protest.
Jonathan Levine 06:58
This is Sonkita Conteh, Namati's director in Sierra Leone.
Sonkita Conteh 07:02
And we've also seen an increase in the damage to the environment. So over time, even though these companies come in with promises of a better life, they end up impoverishing communities—sticking them much deeper into poverty.
Jonathan Levine 07:21
As villages like those in Nimiyama became overrun by aggressive investors, Namati paralegals worked with so many of them that the team arguably became more expert in how the national land laws work than the government's own administrators. So last year, the government took an extraordinary step. It appointed Sonkita Conteh and a Namati colleague to rewrite the land laws. And that put Namati—and the many communities it works with—in a position to influence the environmental and land rights of millions of Sierra Leoneans. Parliament may vote as early as this year on the team's key reforms. And the bills are so progressive that if they pass, Vivek Maru says they would set a precedent for not only Sierra Leone, but for land rights around the world.
Vivek Maru 08:07
in Sierra Leone, we're at an exciting moment. Everything in those bills grows directly out of experiences we have had with communities trying to protect rights and tackle abuse. You don't get to a place like this without the learning that grows out of that grassroots casework.
Jonathan Levine 08:29
The legislation in Sierra Leone is a crowning example of a strategy that Namati has pursued for a decade. It's what Vivek calls the legal empowerment cycle: Case by case, one family and one community at a time, you build up so much practical experience about how laws affect real people, that it eventually forces deep systemic change for entire societies. It follows in the tradition of social movements throughout history, and a tradition that Vivek Maru has been studying since he was a child.
Vivek grew up in a small town in Connecticut, but never far from the influence of his grandfather back in India. He was a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi's independence movement, and dedicated his life to social justice, including several stints of jail time.
Vivek Maru 09:20
Through him, I glimpsed a kind of timeless and beautiful struggle. I remember watching the movie “Gandhi” with Ben Kingsley in my living room on VCR...
"Gandhi" 09:32
The function of a civil resistor is to provoke response, and we will continue to provoke until they respond or they change the law.
Vivek Maru 09:40
...kind of the way kids in my neighborhood would watch Star Wars, like walking in circles and pumping my fist for the good guys.
"Gandhi" 09:46
They are not in control. We are. That is the strength of civil resistance.
Jonathan Levine 09:54
In high school, Vivek got his first taste of collective action when the local school board considered a drastic cut in funding to humanities and other favorite classes. So he organized friends and not only defeated the measure, but won the first student seat on the school board. That gave him a glimpse into the power and responsibilities of governance. In college…
Vivek Maru 10:16
I wrote my thesis about Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X—Mohandas, Martin, and Malcolm. It was trying to tease out their ideas about politics, about social change, and the need for a kind of cultural liberation after centuries of exploitation.
Jonathan Levine 10:35
And he's never forgotten how his own family benefited from the civil rights movement of the 1960s. That's when a new immigration law allowed South Asians and other non-Europeans into the US for the first time since the 1920s.
Vivek Maru 10:50
We owe our presence in this country to that struggle.
Jonathan Levine 10:53
Vivek ended up at Yale Law School but almost dropped out the first year, not because of the academic challenge.
Vivek Maru 11:00
I mean, Gandhi, King, Malcolm X, they were crafting a bold, transformative vision about where our society could go. But in contrast, law seemed esoteric, dominated by elites. And so I was like, this might not work.
Jonathan Levine 11:19
But friends convinced him to hang in. And a few years later, he found himself in Sierra Leone on a human rights fellowship. His assignment: to help the country envision a new model for grappling with the breakdown in social justice that had led to the civil war.
Vivek Maru 11:35
It wasn't until I moved to Sierra Leone in 2003, right at the end of the civil war there, that I started to see what it might look like to bring law and organizing together, and I’ve sort of been obsessed ever since.
Jonathan Levine 11:52
Vivek’s time in Sierra Leone led to the founding of a national organization called Timap for Justice. And it became a blueprint for Namati, the international movement he started eight years later. In the Krio language, Timap means “stand up,” as in Stand Up for Justice. And it started with a trip to South Africa to study a system of community organizers that emerged there in the 1950s to help black South Africans survive the unjust rules of apartheid…
Vivek Maru 12:22
…rules about where you could go, who you could marry, where you could work, what pass you had to have in your pocket. And these community paralegals attempted to support people to navigate that unjust system and to defend themselves against it. That's our origin story! That really was a huge source of inspiration for how to build something in Sierra Leone, working with organizers who were deeply rooted in their communities.
Jonathan Levine 12:47
Vivek and his partner on the project, a local attorney, returned to Sierra Leone and began recruiting paralegals for fieldwork. The idea was to build a new front line in legal aid—something like community health workers in health care. They trained paralegals on how to demystify laws for fellow citizens, how to navigate around complex government agencies, and to organize communities in collective action. At the heart of the model was educating citizens about their rights. Vivek still recalls one of their first cases. A sex worker he calls Kadi was beaten unconscious one night by a drunken off-duty police officer. She later filed a complaint with the police department. But months went by and nothing happened.
Vivek Maru 13:31
And people in the neighborhood are saying to her at this point: “Na fo biya no mo.” It’s Sierra Leonean Krio, it means like, “just accept this blow that life has dealt and move on and survive.” That expression is said a lot in Sierra Leone.
Jonathan Levine 13:49
But Kadi didn't give up. She found her way to the Timap office where she met a paralegal named Joe. He explained to her how they could file a formal complaint based on the officer’s violation of criminal law and police conduct rules. And then he wrote a letter to the officer who beat her to let him know that Kadi intended to pursue disciplinary action and possibly press charges.
Vivek Maru 14:13
And pretty soon thereafter he finds Kadi and apologizes to her in the police station, and he offers her $50 of compensation. She accepts the apology, accepts the cash. Joe is super-frustrated because he's like, this is not a fair outcome. There's been no public rebuke. But for Kadi, a public apology from a police officer and that much compensation was more than she thought was possible. And so I remember that story because it both illustrates how just writing a letter and invoking rules, in a society where law is so broken, that itself can have some traction, and also how a little bit of legal empowerment can allow you to make strides towards justice that don't otherwise seem possible.
Jonathan Levine 15:07
As Timap took on more cases, other organizations sprung up to expand the number of paralegals. But the model of paralegal-assisted justice was not appreciated by everyone in Sierra Leone.
Abdul Tejan-Cole 15:19
The entire concept of legal aid and legal empowerment was met with very stiff resistance at the time from the Bar Association.
Jonathan Levine 15:29
That's Abdul Tejan-Cole, a noted human rights attorney and the former head of Sierra Leone's Anti-Corruption Commission.
Abdul Tejan-Cole 15:35
Lawyers felt that they were the only ones qualified and equipped to represent people and to engage with local communities. And they felt that this was going to affect their business. The government itself was also skeptical that because they felt that by empowering people, people were going to be in opposition to government, and were going to be able to challenge them more often.
Jonathan Levine 15:55
But Timap and its partners eventually convinced the establishment that citizens knowing their rights was a good thing for society. So the Timap model gained traction. The World Bank and others invested millions to expand the ranks of paralegals. Neighboring Liberia adopted the model too. And by 2012, the Sierra Leonean government passed a landmark legal aid law that not only recognized community paralegals, but called for them to operate in every chiefdom of the country. Unfortunately, paralegal support is still not functioning at the scale the law envisioned, and Vivek says the country still struggles to provide justice. But…
Vivek Maru 16:35
That law was an important turning point. It was an early example of how you can build from grassroots struggles towards changes in laws and systems.
Jonathan Levine 16:47
By the late 2000s, seeds of legal empowerment were starting to sprout in organizations of paralegals around the world. But they were all working on a small scale and in isolation. From South Africa to Argentina to the Philippines…
Vivek Maru 17:03
…there really was a movement that was waiting to be built.
Jonathan Levine 17:08
So he brought these groups together in a loose coalition with Namati organizing and building solidarity. Namati is a Sanskrit word that means to shape something into a curve, and it was inspired by a 1964 speech by Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. 17:26
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice…
Jonathan Levine 17:32
Namati set out to bend that curve faster and tighter, in part through that coalition of grassroots justice organizations known as the Legal Empowerment Network. Today it numbers more than 2,400 groups working in nearly every country in the world. They share strategies and frequently campaign together, on everything from women's rights to corruption. At the same time, Namati has built its own teams of paralegals in a half-dozen countries where it's dug deeply into a handful of issues directly. In Myanmar in India, it concentrates on land and environmental abuses. in Mozambique, health workers used to routinely shake down patients for services they should have gotten for free. So Namati and local partners pushed through an anti-bribery law and other policies that cut major violations in health centers by almost half. The vast majority of these cases are won not by litigation, but through mediation and negotiation by paralegals. Even so, Namati doesn't have the resources to take on every case, and it never will. Instead, the goal is more of a do-it-yourself approach to justice. Take the barriers to citizenship in Kenya. For decades, government policies there have discriminated against certain minorities by denying them national IDs. Here's how a Kenyan paralegal named Zena describes it.
Zena 18:56
If you don't have this identity document, you can't vote. You can't go to school, you can't get health cover. You can't get employment. You don't have the freedom of movement. And you can't access any government building. It is like you're trapped.
Jonathan Levine 19:11
But after years of working on the problem, Namati and local organizations have recently had a breakthrough. They won policy changes that make it easier for people to secure their documents on their own.
Vivek Maru 19:24
Our goal is not a paralegal for every problem. Our goal is to make the system such that people can solve their problems themselves without a paralegal.
Jonathan Levine 19:34
The impact of that kind of advocacy mission is notoriously hard to measure. But since 2012 Namati has documented more than 40,000 cases handled by its paralegals, from winning basic health care rights for individual families to helping entire communities rein in industrial polluters. All told, Namati counts more than 1.3 million people who have benefited directly from its work. But that vastly under-counts the impact from systemic changes in policies and enforcement. For example, in Gujarat, India, millions of people are breathing cleaner air since Namati paralegals got regulators there to force 10 large industrial polluters to comply with emissions regulations.
What makes Namati successful is a nuanced combination of approach and skill. Many traditional human rights organizations typically confront government to try to change policy, naming and shaming and exposing its faults through the media. Namati tends to be more collaborative. Make no mistake, it is always on the side of justice for its communities. But whenever possible, says human rights lawyer Abdul Tejan-Cole, it works with policymakers to find those solutions, as it did in Sierra Leone with the rewriting of the land laws.
Abdul Tejan-Cole 20:58
Our governments are generally wary and scared of civil society. So when they open the door and they allow you in, it means you've earned their respect and their confidence. The government knows and accepts that the role that Namati is playing is key to the development of the society.
Jonathan Levine 21:21
Despite that progress, the challenges of defending justice around the world are becoming more and more severe. Consider the sources of injustice at work these days: increasing battles over land and water, the intensifying scramble for global resources, a refugee crisis on just about every continent, the rise of authoritarian regimes trashing the rule of law, growing economic and health disparities made worse by the COVID pandemic, and a climate emergency that is exacerbating all of the above. As Namati sees it, all of this points to an increasing power struggle over land and environment, with the poor and powerless getting the short end of the stick.
Vivek Maru 22:05
We are in a perilous moment. Today, land and environment—it’s organically arisen as one of the most important ways in which people's basic well-being is at risk. Land, water, air, soil—you can't live without those things. And there are massive imbalances of power at play between communities who are at risk, and the powers that are making the decisions about what happens to our land and environment.
Jonathan Levine 22:38
To deal with that threat, Namati is now doubling down on its approach to these abuses. Think of it as Namati 2.0. It's in the early stages of forming what Vivek calls a Global Corps of Grassroots Environmental Defenders. In five target countries—India, Myanmar, Sierra Leone, Kenya, and for the first time, in the United States—the plan is to increase the number of paralegals working on these issues and deepen their expertise in environmental law, enforcement and advocacy. And then, turbo-charge the learning and collective action of members across Namati’s global network and beyond, so that ordinary people most affected by land and environment laws have a strong voice in how they're written and enforced.
Vernice Miller-Travis 23:18
Well, I think they're thinking at a transformation scale, not at a tinkering-in-the-margin scale, but at a systems level transformation. That's where we need to be.
Jonathan Levine 23:29
That's Vernice Miller-Travis, a co-founder of New York-based WeAct for Environmental Justice, and an authority on civil rights and environmental policy. She also sits on Namati’s US advisory board.
Vernice Miller-Travis 23:42
We've been tinkering for a really long time—let's fix this piece of legislation, let's fix this regulation or statute, as opposed to let's fix the whole damn system.
Jonathan Levine 23:53
In the past Namati’s cross-border collaborations have been diffused across many independent partners working on a huge array of justice issues. So to accelerate the focus on environment, Namati plans to select a narrow group of influential partners in the five target countries, rigorously train them and coordinate their activities into a tightly united movement. And for the first time, it will set some hard objectives on common targets. For example, over the next five years, it's targeting 100 large-scale industrial and agribusiness projects to clean up their act on environmental violations, and securing community rights to over a million hectares of vulnerable common resources.
Vivek Maru 24:37
So in those five countries, that's the plan: Go deep, go long, not give up no matter how dark things get.
Jonathan Levine 24:42
Namati has already had a taste of what can be achieved with concentrated and sustained effort. Over the past 10 years, its network of paralegal organizations has played a central role in helping to pass a precedent-setting treaty across Latin America and the Caribbean. It's called the Escazu Agreement—it just came into effect this April. And it's designed to protect people who try to defend the environment. It's dangerous work. The watchdog Global Witness said in its latest report that 212 environmental activists were murdered in 2019, the deadliest year ever. Earlier this year four indigenous Peruvians were killed protesting deforestation of the Amazon.
Vivek Maru 25:26
This is a shameful fact about the 21st century—that these people, when they stand up for their own communities, they are protecting all of us when they resist illegal deforestation of the Amazon. But instead of protecting them, we're allowing them to be killed.
Jonathan Levine 25:47
The Escazu Agreement is a first but important step in addressing that travesty. And if Namati’s network hopes to replicate that success, Vivek knows it will need to build more organizational muscle around catalyzing collective action. And it will need to invest more heavily in environmental justice groups as well—he figures around $5 million over the next five years, in addition to shifting a significant portion of Namati’s own $10 million annual budget to the cause.
Terrell Askew 26:18
I’m standing in front of open uncovered coal piles three stories tall in Baltimore City, across the street from a recreation center, a children's playground and a basketball court. This community has one of the highest rates of asthma in this country. No one should have to live like this.
Jonathan Levine 26:39
That's Terrell Askew, a Namati legal advocate in Baltimore, Maryland. Namati works mostly in developing countries that lack lawyers and sophisticated legal systems that can reliably dispense justice. So why would it even think about opening shop in the United States, the most lawyered country on Earth?
Vivek Maru 27:00
These issues of justice and rights, they don't just show up in certain kinds of countries, they show up everywhere. And despite that over-abundance of people qualified to practice law, we have a massive justice crisis in this country.
Jonathan Levine 27:16
In fact, the US government set up the nonprofit Legal Services Corporation in 1974, specifically to ensure civil legal aid for Americans who can't afford it. But its own study a few years ago showed 86% of civil legal problems reported by low-income Americans—86%—received inadequate or no legal help at all. In other words, if you're facing eviction or environmental harm from the factory next door, and you can't afford a lawyer, you're pretty much on your own. Again, Vernice Miller-Travis.
Vernice Miller-Travis 27:53
II's been so challenging for community environmental struggles, particularly in communities of color, for people to access legal resources to really engage in those battles. For years and years and years, these communities fought these battles by themselves.
Jonathan Levine 28:10
That's why a few years ago, Namati started bringing its experience from Sierra Leone and elsewhere to the United States. That's a big reversal of the typical flow of development ideas from the US out to poor countries. The paralegals it's hiring here now help communities gather evidence of harm done to them, and then appeal to pollution control boards, land administration and other agencies that have the power to enforce regulations. And it's proven to be an effective alternative to hiring expensive lawyers to file lawsuits. Take Buzzard Point in southwest Washington DC, just a few miles from Namati’s headquarters. The neighborhood is home to a largely black community—and also cement factories, a ton of industrial truck traffic, hazardous chemicals left over from old industrial sites, and the reconstruction of a deteriorating bridge, the largest infrastructure project in the city's history. The impacts of all the air and noise pollution have been overwhelming. So Namati trained local community leaders on environmental law. And with its help contacting city officials, they've recently gotten the DC government to erect a dust control fence to help reduce pollution and commit to doing a deep risk assessment of the bridge project. Those are concrete first steps for the neighborhood. But a larger point is also at play.
Vernice Miller-Travis 29:37
Namati is working with those communities to raise up their voices, their objections, and to inform the policy-making so that the same communities are not disproportionately impacted by the same kinds of environmental and land-use decision-making over and over and over again. It's a very powerful model, you know, deceptively powerful, when you give people the tools to change their own destiny.
Jonathan Levine 30:05
Vivek Maru is under no illusion that any of this will be easy—in the US or anywhere else—given the forces gathering against the justice movement. The military coup in Myanmar early this year is only the latest shift toward authoritarian rule. And that's in a country where a Namati had recently made progress in protecting land rights. Now, with some of Namati’s paralegals there in hiding, and one in jail, its strategy for defending justice in the face of military rule is up in the air.
Vivek Maru 30:37
In many places, repression is on the rise. So it's almost like trying to keep this wheel from turning backwards.
Jonathan Levine 30:43
When it comes to risks, the United States holds a particular challenge. Remember the movie “Erin Brockovich?” Julia Roberts plays a real-life paralegal who helped residents of a small California town win a huge settlement against a big utility for contaminating their groundwater.
"Erin Brockovich" 31:00
Opposing Attorney: Let's be honest here. $20 million is more money than these people have ever dreamed of.
Erin Brockovich: See, now that pisses me off. First of all, since the demur we have more than 400 plaintiffs, and let's be honest, we all know there are more out there. They may not be the most sophisticated people, but they do know how to divide. And $20 million isn’t shit when you split it between them.
Ed Masry: Erin…
Jonathan Levine 31:23
It turns out, says Vivek Maru, a lot of what Erin Brockovich did—advising residents on their claims and organizing more than 600 of them to join a class action—was probably against the law. Because under state statutes in most situations, only accredited lawyers are allowed to advise clients.
Vivek Maru 31:42
A lot of people don't realize this. You can educate a neighbor about their rights, you can share with them what the law might say. But the moment you brainstorm with a neighbor of yours, if you are not a qualified lawyer, about how they might use legal provisions to actually solve a problem they face, you are committing a crime called Unauthorized Practice of Law. I love Erin Brockovich. I’ve spoken to her about this. And when I asked Erin about these rules, she was like, well, I won't repeat the curse word that she used, but she was like, these rules violate the First Amendment. And if people knew about them, they would be enraged.
Jonathan Levine 32:18
As long as Namati paralegals stick to public hearings, like at environmental agencies, and avoid formal legal proceedings where they might be seen as representing clients, Vivek says they should be on safe ground. But it's one more risk in the minefield on the road to justice.
Jonathan Levine 32:38
Maybe the biggest challenge of all, though, is money. For decades, funding for justice rights organizations around the world has been woefully anemic. Vivek often tells the story of one of the movement’s greatest moments. Back in 2015, after the field had been advocating for years for the importance of justice in the world's development agenda, “Access to Justice for All” was finally included as the 16th out of 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 by the United Nations.
Vivek Maru 33:11
We worked so hard to get that language in there and we squeaked by, you know, we got the 16th out of 17 goals, which was a huge deal and an important historic recognition that you can't have development without justice. But then the scandal was, on the day that the goals were adopted, most of the calls were accompanied by big commitments—$25 billion for health care and education, billions of dollars from various governments and foundations. And meanwhile, on justice, nobody pledged a penny. That was a wake-up call that our work is just beginning on this front.
Jonathan Levine 33:46
The reasons are varied and complex. For one thing, the metrics used to justify investment are hard to communicate.
David Sasaki 33:54
When it comes to justice, the stories are so complex—injustice is so complex—that you can't just say that 50% of people had a legal problem last year that was resolved, and now it's 70%. It's a much more complicated story.
Jonathan Levine 34:10
That's David Sasaki, a program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, one of Namati’s funders. The irony is that Namati’s own fundraising has been phenomenal.
David Sasaki 34:22
I've never seen an organization start from a start-up to have a $10 million-per-year budget so fast as they have.
Jonathan Levine 34:30
In part, Sasaki says that's because Namati quickly seized the role of international convener in the field, and worked across multiple countries, earning greater visibility and a privileged position, compared to most small organizations working in only one country. And with that privilege, Namati has demonstrated what he calls “movement generosity.”
David Sasaki 34:53
They know they've been very fortunate, and so they redirect a lot of their funding to the larger community of legal empowerment. Because they know that shifts in power in society—it's never done by one organization. It's almost always in coalition. It’s by bringing them together that the media starts to really pay attention, and public officials start to pay attention, and attitudes about what's possible start to change.
Jonathan Levine 35:20
Which is why Vivek invited a bunch of his own donors to a meeting a few years ago, and tactfully pressed them for a way to come up with more funding for the field. And that eventually led to the formation of the Grassroots Legal Empowerment Fund. Later this year Hewlett Foundation together with the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Fund for Human Global Rights, are expected to announce their commitment to raise and invest $100 million over the next 10 years into small justice organizations around the world. Although COVID-19 has slowed down some commitments, Sasaki is convinced the money will come. And through no small part because of Namati.
David Sasaki 36:02
Namati has been a very useful thought partner and critical friend, to speak truth to funders.
Jonathan Levine 36:09
Justice is a long game. But Vivek Maru is impatient in his pursuit of social justice, on the heels of King, Gandhi, Malcolm X, and his own grandfather. For him, connecting the dots couldn't be simpler. And to make the point, he's fond of quoting an environmental activist named Hop Hopkins,
Vivek Maru 36:31
And he says: “You can't have climate change without sacrifice zones. And you can't have sacrifice zones without disposable people.” And I think he's dead right. We're not going to overcome any of these major challenges, whether it's poverty or authoritarianism or our environmental crisis if we don't tackle that underlying injustice—if we don't fight to make no community disposable.
Jonathan Levine 37:04
Thank you for joining me today on Uncharted Ground. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and tell your friends. And if you have an idea about a social innovator whose successful solution to a big global problem would make a good story, write to us: at [email protected]. In our next episode, a huge part of the world lacks access to clean drinking water. And a lot of organizations have tried a lot of solutions. One father and son team thinks the answer is not more humanitarian aid.
Randy Welsch 37:44
I just came to the conclusion there's got to be business solutions to poverty.
Jonathan Levine 37:48
The business of clean water—next time on Uncharted Ground. This episode was produced and written by me, and edited by Jennifer Goren, with sound editing and design by Tina Tobey. My thanks to Vivek Maru and his entire team at Namati. And special thanks to Hassan Sesay and Foday Nabieu for their help in Sierra Leone. Uncharted Ground is produced and distributed in partnership with the Stanford Social Innovation Review at Stanford University, and online at ssir.org. I'm Jonathan Levine, and you've been on Uncharted Ground.