People's Parity Project: What Donors Need to Know
People’s Parity Project (PPP) was founded in 2017 by a group of Harvard Law students to address growing inequities and unfair treatment in the legal system. PPP began by organizing law students against forced arbitration and coercive contracts at large law firms, and has since expanded its advocacy to include issues like diversifying the federal bench, judicial reform, and accountability for Trump Administration officials. In addition to its advocacy work, PPP seeks to support and connect progressive-minded law students and lawyers in building their careers.
The organization is led by co-founder and Executive Director Molly Coleman, along with Policy and Program Director Tristin Brown. While PPP is young in both its leadership and institutions, the group has shown itself to be highly effective in both networking and organizing. COVID has slowed PPP’s growth, but the organization’s future remains bright. As this report will explain, Blue Tent recommends donations to People’s Parity Project, while their work on building a progressive legal pipeline and pushing legal thinkers in a new direction should be considered a high priority. (Explore our methodology.)
The following brief will answer questions for prospective donors about PPP’s vision, strategy and organizational health. The answers below are drawn from independent research and reporting, including conversations with PPP’s leadership and staff, as well as discussions with other progressive leaders focused on the courts and legal issues.
Is it a top leader in its space—or have the potential to be?
PPP is a young but growing organization that has led the way with both its strategy and selected issues. While PPP is still far behind other advocacy and legal pipeline-building groups in terms of funding and membership, the organization has displayed a high level of competence and authority, quickly finding buy-in from its targeted constituencies. While other groups have tried for years to build big tent networks of liberal lawyers and law students, PPP has found success by putting an uncompromising progressive vision front and center.
Does it have a persuasive theory of change and a realistic strategy?
Yes. PPP is following a familiar path tread by conservatives in the law, but aimed toward progressives. While other organizations, like the American Constitution Society, have tried to mimic the conservative legal movement without much success, PPP takes a more exacting approach. As Coleman explained to Blue Tent, when the Federalist Society was formed, the group “identified a subset of people in law schools and law practice, people who felt marginalized, and provided them something.”
PPP has found support for its advocacy work among more unabashedly left-wing, public-interest-focused law students, to whom it also offers a community and network of like-minded peers. This community encourages progressive lawyers to advocate for the inclusion of their ideas in the academy and to pursue work focused on helping regular people over prosecution and defending corporations. Down the road, that network will help them to advance their careers and build important relationships. The community will also provide a support system for lawyers not focused on public interest work, either as a place to engage progressive issues in the law, or possibly to pivot their careers to focus on public interest.
Other groups on the left have tried to pursue a similar strategy, but with mixed success. PPP is different in that it defines its principles in opposition to both legal conservatism and the corporate-friendly, tough-on-crime liberalism that is hegemonic in the law profession. Like other progressive insurgencies within liberalism and the Democratic party in recent years, PPP has built a smaller tent, but as a result, has found a more highly engaged base of members.
On the advocacy side, PPP believes in the idea of “organizing where you are,” and stays fixated on law students and lawyers. As explained in more detail below, part of PPP’s early work relied on organizing Harvard Law students in particular, using their position to extract changes in an ambitious but realistic strategy. As PPP’s membership and network grow, those targeted organizing strategies will expand as well.
Is there strong evidence of its impact?
PPP’s earliest success came through a novel approach to organizing, which focused on elite law students and their collective leverage over the law firms that hoped to hire them. With only a small number of law students, PPP was able to get Harvard to require firms that recruit there to disclose the existence of coercive clauses in their employment contracts, while targeted protests have led to numerous major firms, each with thousands of employees, to get rid of such clauses.
The impact of PPP’s community-building and “pipeline” work for a progressive legal movement is difficult to measure at this stage, both due to the organization’s young age and the impact of COVID-19 on such activities in the past year. Less than four years after its founding, PPP now has chapters at 13 law schools, and is in the nascent stages of building chapters and networks for practicing attorneys.
Does it have a plan to achieve future impact?
Yes. In addition to continuing to organize law students and other members, PPP plans to continue expanding its presence on law school campuses. PPP is also planning to invest further in networks and communities for practicing lawyers. Building these networks and communities will help progressives in the legal profession to enter public interest work or contribute to big-picture change, even if they aren’t focused on progressive issues in their regular work. The larger and more wide-reaching these networks become, the more effective they will be, both in terms of pipeline-building and PPP’s advocacy work.
Does it have strong leadership and governance?
PPP currently has only two full-time staff members, both of whom are recent law school graduates. Executive Director Molly Coleman co-founded PPP at Harvard Law School, where she also worked for numerous social justice legal organizations. Before becoming a lawyer, Coleman worked for City Year in New York as a corps member, team leader, and impact manager. Policy and Program Director Tristin Brown most recently worked as associate counsel at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, with previous experience as a district staff assistant for Florida Congresswoman Gwen Graham.
PPP’s board of directors is led by co-chairs Jacob Lipton, associate director of Justice Catalyst, and LiJia Gong, counsel at Public Rights Project. The rest of the board is largely made up of young, progressive lawyers, including co-founder Vail Kohnert-Yount, who serves as secretary and communications director, and Harvard Law Professor Nikolas Bowie. PPP also maintains an advisory council of more experienced lawyers, law professors and nonprofit leaders, like Christopher Kang of Demand Justice and Rachel Deutsch of Center for Popular Democracy, among others.
Is it diverse and culturally competent?
Yes. PPP’s founders, leadership, board of directors and advisory council are diverse in terms of race, gender and sexual orientation, while the organization itself actively centers issues pertaining to equity, representation, and the treatment of marginalized people.
Is its financial house in order?
PPP did not provide any financial information aside from previous funders (more detail on that is below) and no financial information is currently publicly available.
Is it respected by its peers?
PPP is not as well-known among its peers, but many of its advisory council members are leaders in the progressive legal world. These include Christopher Kang, co-founder of Demand Justice; Rachel Deutsch, supervising attorney for worker justice at Center for Popular Democracy; Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at Open Markets Institute; Deepak Gupta and Jennifer Bennet of the appellate and Supreme Court law firm Gupta Wessler PLLC; and others.
Does it collaborate well with other organizations and have strong partnerships?
PPP regularly joins with other progressive groups in coalition letters and advocacy campaigns, including legal groups like Demand Justice and the Brennan Center for Justice; unions like the SEIU and American Federation of Teachers; good government groups like the Revolving Door Project; and others.
Does it have the support of key funders?
PPP has received grants from Harvard Law School, Justice Catalyst, and Center for Popular Democracy. Executive Director Molly Coleman told Blue Tent that she hopes by 2022 for PPP to be in a place to go after major grants from larger foundations. A major portion of PPP’s funding comes from individual giving; Coleman said she expects that to remain the case going forward, with hopes that plaintiff-side lawyers and firms can become a major funding source. PPP does not accept donations from “BigLaw firms or corporate America,” and Coleman told Blue Tent that she expects PPP to draw certain “red lines” regarding funding that other organizations might not.
Conclusion
PPP has already been impactful, given its small size and (presumably) low funding. The organization’s advocacy strategy of organizing highly sought-after law students to force change at massive firms has been both incisive and well-executed, and may only increase in effectiveness as PPP grows and more of its student members join the bar. PPP’s focus on building a tight-knit, principled community for progressive lawyers also shows promise, and could end up being a vital contribution to the immense task of countering the right’s legal movement.
But PPP is still in its “startup” phase as an organization, with an extremely young staff and leadership that complicate many of the factors that would normally be measured in evaluation. PPP has yet to win the support of major funders or a strong enough individual donor program to support its needed growth, and its lack of available financial data leaves other questions unanswered.
That being said, progressives will occasionally have to take chances on unproven leaders and startup organizations in order to build effective institutions and networks, especially in conservative-dominated areas like the law and courts. The composition of the group’s advisory council is a sign that well-respected leaders in PPP’s field have confidence in the group and its leadership. Likewise, the council’s advisory presence may compensate for some of PPP’s shortcomings in experience and knowledge as the organization moves through its early years. For these reasons, Blue Tent recommends donors invest in People’s Parity Project, whose work is a high priority for the progressive movement. (Explore our methodology.)
