Anew Volunteer Club: Archive Project with LEAH’s Jailhouse Lawyer Initiative
For the May installment of the Anew Volunteer Club, we will be working with The Jailhouse Lawyer Initiative (JLI), a program of the Legal Empowerment & Advocacy Hub (LEAH) housed in the Bernstein Institute for Human Rights at NYU School of Law. LEAH was founded and is led by Jhody Polk, a formerly incarcerated jailhouse lawyer, and Anew Entrepreneur in Residence.
As the first program of LEAH, the JLI invests in jailhouse lawyers as a core strategy for ending the cycle of incarceration — fusing legal education, movement building, and community peace building to ensure that directly affected individuals have the power to know, use, and shape the law. The JLI works under the framework of legal empowerment and peacebuilding, two pillars of LEAH that work to shift power, knowledge, and resources to isolated communities so they can become the authors of their own liberation and change systems from the inside out.
What you'll be doing: You'll be doing archival work, digitizing handwritten letters from New York jailhouse lawyers and preserving the physical originals as the foundation of a future book project. The evening will open with a group letter reading, a reflection, and a conversation with a jailhouse lawyer to ground the work in the humanity behind every letter you handle.
This event is part of Community Week NYC (May 9-17, 2026) - a citywide celebration of social connection. Explore all events so you can find your people at www.communityweek.nyc.
The Legal Empowerment & Advocacy Hub (LEAH) was founded in 2019 with the mission to ensure isolated communities have access to legal empowerment, education and peacebuilding.
The Jailhouse Lawyer Initiative (JLI) invests in jailhouse lawyers as a core strategy to ending the cycle of incarceration.
Anew is a gathering space and discovery center for the social impact community.