NINA DASTUR

Nina Dastur is a Senior Fellow at the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality. Previously, she served as the Director of Policy and Advocacy for Union Settlement Association in East Harlem, where her work focused on issues affecting low income people across the life span, including early childhood education, adult education and workforce development, and healthy aging, as well as on strategies to promote civic engagement in social services organizations. Before joining Union Settlement, she spent nine years at the Center for Community Change (CCC) as a Fellow and Senior Policy Analyst. As an Equal Justice Works Fellow at CCC, she created and staffed the Catalyst Project, which provided public education, civic engagement training, leadership development, and technical policy support to grassroots organizing groups to promote equitable development in the District of Columbia. More recently, as a member of the Center’s policy staff she provided technical assistance to grassroots organizing groups on campaigns focused on the economy, job creation and job quality, and affordable housing. Prior to CCC, she helped to create and run a poverty policy clinic at Georgetown University Law Center, where she supervised second- and third-year law students engaged in local advocacy. She started her career as a legal services lawyer, first at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, where she represented parents involved in the child welfare system and worked on policy issues relating to the intersection of welfare and child welfare, and subsequently at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, where she represented low income residents in housing, public benefits, and family law matters, and directed the organization’s law reform work. She graduated with honors from Duke University and Harvard Law School.