Podcast appearances and mentions of vivek maru

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How Grassroots Movements for Climate and Environmental Justice Are Critical to Surviving the Climate CrisisDiscussion with Vivek Maru on the importance of community paralegals in extending access to the law, enforcing rights and aiding in structural change. We discuss the Customary Land Rights Act in Sierra Leone, the Community Land Act in Kenya and environmental justice action in Myanmar. We also discuss environmental injustice within the United States, the need for cumulative impact in any environmental assessment and the importance of having both expert input on legislation as well as the lived experience of affected communities. Additionally, we discuss the importance of prior informed consent and moving from extractive to regenerative practices. We also discuss climate justice as an integral pathway toward climate mitigation and adaptation.For More Info: http://thegravity.fm/#/episode/57

On this episode of My Block Counts, Dr. Sacoby Wilson is joined by Vivek Maru, founder and chief executive officer of Namati. My Block Counts is a podcast series produced by The Center for Community Engagement, Environmental Justice, and Health, with assistance from WYPR. The views expressed are solely Dr. Wilson's.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We are living with a global epidemic of injustice, but we've been choosing to ignore it.  More than 25 years ago, Vivek Maru told his grandmother that he wanted to go to law school. “Grandma didn't pause,” he recounted. “She said to me, ‘Lawyer is liar.’” Though he went on to fulfill that desire, Vivek soon realized that his grandmother wasn’t entirely wrong. Vivek came to see that “something about law and lawyers has gone wrong.” Law is “supposed to be the language we use to translate our dreams about justice into living institutions that hold us together” – to honor the dignity of everyone, strong or weak. But as he told an audience on the TEDGlobal stage in 2017, lawyers are not only expensive and out of reach for most – worse, “our profession has shrouded law in a cloak of complexity. Law is like riot gear on a police officer. It's intimidating and impenetrable, and it's hard to tell there's something human underneath.” In 2011, Vivek founded Namati to demystify the law, facilitate global grassroots-led systems change, and to grow the movement for legal empowerment around the world. Namati and its partners have built cadres of grassroots legal advocates in eight countries. The advocates have worked with more than 65,000 people to protect community lands, enforce environmental law, and secure basic rights to health care and citizenship. Globally, Namati convenes the Legal Empowerment Network, made up of more than 3,000 groups from over 170 countries who are learning from one another and collaborating on common challenges. This community successfully advocated for the inclusion of justice in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, and for the creation of the Legal Empowerment Fund, with a goal of putting $100 million into grassroots justice efforts worldwide. Though he nearly dropped out of law school after his first year because the law felt disconnected from the problems of ordinary people he had encountered in rural villages the year earlier, Vivek stuck with it and moved to Sierra Leone soon after he graduated, just after the end of a brutal 11-year civil war. Several years before Namati, he co-founded an organization called Timap (which means “stand up”) to help rural Sierra Leoneans address injustice and hold government accountable. Realizing that a conventional legal aid model would have been unworkable, as there were only 100 lawyers in Sierra Leone (more than 90 of which were in the capital rather than in rural areas), he instead focused on training a frontline of community paralegals in basic law and in tools like mediation, advocacy, education, and organizing. Just like a health care system relies on nurses, midwives, and community health workers in addition to physicians, he saw that justice required community paralegals (sometimes called “barefoot lawyers”) to serve as a bridge to serve the legal needs of communities and “to turn law from an abstraction or a threat into something that every single person can understand, use and shape.” As he later recounted, “We found that paralegals are often able to squeeze justice out of a broken system: stop a school master from beating children; negotiate child support payments from a derelict father; persuade the water authority to repair a well. In exceptionally intractable cases, as when a mining company in the southern province damaged six villages’ land and abandoned the region without paying compensation, a tiny corps of lawyers can resort to litigation and higher-level advocacy to obtain a remedy.” More significantly, he realized: Paralegals are from the communities they serve. They demystify law, break it down into simple terms, and then they help people look for a solution. They don't focus on the courts alone. They look everywhere: ministry departments, local government, an ombudsman's office. Lawyers sometimes say to their clients, "I'll handle it for you. I've got you." Paralegals have a different message, not "I'm going to solve it for you," but "We're going to solve it together, and in the process, we're both going to grow." And case by case and story by story, community paralegals help paint a portrait of the system as a whole, which can serve as the basis for systemic change efforts in laws and policy. “This is a different way of approaching reform. This is not a consultant flying into Myanmar with a template he's going to cut and paste from Macedonia, and this is not an angry tweet. This is about growing reforms from the experience of ordinary people trying to make the rules and systems work,” Vivek says. It’s ultimately “about forging a deeper version of democracy in which we the people, we don't just cast ballots every few years, we take part daily in the rules and institutions that hold us together, in which everyone, even the least powerful, can know law, use law and shape law.” Vivek was named a Social Entrepreneur of the Year by the World Economic Forum, a “legal rebel” by the American Bar Association, and an Ashoka Fellow. He received the Pioneer Award from the North American South Asian Bar Association in 2008. He, Namati, and the Global Legal Empowerment Network received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2016. He graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, and Yale Law School. His undergraduate thesis was called Mohandas, Martin, and Malcolm on Violence, Culture, and Meaning. Prior to starting Namati, he served as senior counsel in the Justice Reform Group of the World Bank.  Vivek is co-author of Community Paralegals and the Pursuit of  Justice (Cambridge University Press). His TED talk, “How to Put the Power of Law in People’s Hands,” has been viewed over a million times. He lives with his family in Washington, DC., and though he travels a lot, he tries to spend time in a forest or other natural place every week, wherever he is. Vivek studies capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art that mixes dance with fighting techniques as a creative form of resistance, with Dale Marcelin at Universal Capoeira Angola Center. “There’s a mischievousness and soulfulness even though you’re engaging in a life-and-death struggle,” Maru says. “I like its lesson of smiling in the face of danger.” He is also deeply influenced by his Jain spiritual background and Gandhian principles. He is interested in a Jainism that balances an inward turn with an engagement in the outer world, citing a Jain monk who said “The test of true spirituality is in practice, not isolation . . . there is a need to strike the right balance between internal and external development.”   Join us in conversation with this exceptional leader and warrior for justice!

In this episode I reflect on this year and let you know about the research I found regarding the alternatives within the legal industry and where they came from What I learned and where the legal industry can grow. I talk about the Namati Global Organization and the TedTalk with Vivek Maru that inspired me to be the best legal professional and showed me that with the skills I have acquired I am limitless and so are you.  The legal industry pours out into every industry around the world and guess what? So can you! What the ABA has to say about limited licensing legal technicians and so many other reliable resources that we can count on. The Let's Talk Paralegal is one of them (hopefully) :) Until Justice is served..... I'll be hereSupport the show

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 can be found at https://ssir.org/podcasts/category/unchartedground.

Senator Mazie Hirono joins Christiane Amanpour to share how her immigrant experience and her indomitable mother inspire her public service. Then artist Julie Mehretu talks about her retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the meaning behind her extraordinary abstract art. Vivek Maru is founder of Namati, which empowers grassroots groups to protect common lands and enforce environmental laws, while Rhonda Hamilton works with Namati to combat unlawful pollution in her own D.C. neighborhood. They speak to our Hari Sreenivasan to discuss their work.To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy

We have a vision of justice as blind, impartial, and fair — but in reality, the law often fails those who need it most. This hour, TED speakers explore radical ways to change the legal system. Guests include lawyer and social justice advocate Robin Steinberg, animal rights lawyer Steven Wise, political activist Brett Hennig, and lawyer and social entrepreneur Vivek Maru.

What can you do when the wheels of justice don't turn fast enough? Or when they don't turn at all? Vivek Maru is working to transform the relationship between people and law, turning law from an abstraction or threat into something that everyone can understand, use and shape. Instead of relying solely on lawyers, Maru started a global network of community paralegals, or barefoot lawyers, who serve in their own communities and break the law down into simple terms to help people find solutions. Learn more about how this innovative approach to using the law is helping socially excluded people claim their rights. "A little bit of legal empowerment can go a long way," Maru says. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Que faire lorsque les rouages de la justice ne tournent pas assez vite ? Ou lorsqu'ils ne tournent pas du tout ? Vivek Maru s'emploie à transformer la relation entre le peuple et le droit qui, à l'origine abstrait et menaçant, devient une discipline que tout le monde peut comprendre, utiliser et façonner. Au lieu de dépendre des seuls avocats, Maru a créé un réseau mondial d'assistants juridiques, ou d'avocats aux pieds nus, qui servent leurs propres communautés et résument le droit en termes simples afin d'aider les gens à trouver des solutions. Découvrez comment cette approche novatrice du droit aide les personnes en situation d'exclusion sociale à revendiquer leurs droits. « Un peu d'autonomisation juridique peut faire la différence », soutient-il.

O que você pode fazer quando as rodas da justiça não giram rápido o suficiente? Ou quando elas simplesmente não giram? Vivek Maru trabalha para transformar a relação entre as pessoas e a lei, transformando a lei de uma abstração ou ameaça em algo que todos possam entender, usar e adequar. Em vez de confiar apenas em advogados, Maru começou um rede mundial de paralegais comunitários, ou "barefoot lawyers", que servem suas próprias comunidades e destrincham a lei em termos simples para ajudar as pessoas a encontrarem soluções. Saiba mais sobre como essa abordagem inovadora de usar a lei está ajudando pessoas socialmente excluídas a reclamar seus direitos. "Um pequeno empoderamento legal pode fazer uma grande diferença", diz Maru.

¿Qué puedes hacer cuando los mecanismos de la justicia no se mueven lo suficiente? ¿O cuando no se mueven en absoluto? Vivek Maru está trabajando para transformar la relación entre las personas y la ley. En lugar de confiar en los abogados, Maru ha iniciado una red global de asistentes jurídicos comunitarios o abogados descalzos, que sirven en sus propias comunidades y descifran la ley en términos simples. Obtenga más información sobre cómo este enfoque innovador para usar la ley ayuda a las personas socialmente excluidas a reclamar sus derechos. "Un poco de empoderamiento legal puede llegar muy lejos", dice Maru.

What can you do when the wheels of justice don't turn fast enough? Or when they don't turn at all? Vivek Maru is working to transform the relationship between people and law, turning law from an abstraction or threat into something that everyone can understand, use and shape. Instead of relying solely on lawyers, Maru started a global network of community paralegals, or barefoot lawyers, who serve in their own communities and break the law down into simple terms to help people find solutions. Learn more about how this innovative approach to using the law is helping socially excluded people claim their rights. "A little bit of legal empowerment can go a long way," Maru says.

정의의 바퀴가 충분히 빠르게 돌아가지 않는다면 당신은 무엇을 할 수 있나요? 또는 그 바퀴들이 전혀 움직이지 않는다면요? 비베크 마루는 사람들과 법의 관계를 바꾸기 위해 일하고있습니다. 추상적이고 위협적인 법에서 모든 사람들이 이해할 수 있고 사용하며 만들 수 있는 법으로 말이죠. 마루는 지역 준법률가나 맨발의 변호사들의 세계적인 네트워크를 형성하기 시작했습니다. 그들은 지역사회를 위해 봉사하고 법을 보다 단순한 용어로 바꾸어 해결책을 찾는 사람들을 돕습니다. 법을 사용하는 이런 혁신적인 접근법이 어떻게 소외된 사람들이 권리를 찾는 것을 돕고 있는지 알아보세요. "작은 법적 권한 부여가 긴 길을 가게합니다"라고 마루는 말합니다.

Namati puts the rule of law in the hands of people. The rule of law is a bedrock of most modern societies. No one is above the law. We are all equal under the law. And yet, more than four billion people live outside of the protection of the law. Their rights are easily violated. They have no right to their land. They are denied basic human rights. They are threatened and intimidated, often by the very people who are supposed to protect them. Vivek Maru learned about social justice from his grandfather who was part of the Gandhian Movement. Vivek wrote his undergrad thesis on Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Malcom X. After college, he received a fellowship to study Gandhian social action in India. He settled in the Kutch district. There he worked on watershed development. Upon returning to law school, he felt conflicted. He considered dropping out. “What I was learning about the law seemed so contradictory to that Gandhian spirit that I admire,” he told me. But he stuck with his studies. By 2003, Vivek made his way to Sierra Leone, just after the end of a bloody civil war that had left more than 50,000 dead. Though the country had achieved peace, most of the civil institutions were weak or non-existent. In the entire country, there were less than 100 lawyers. Most of those were in the capital city of Freetown. Across rural Sierra Leone, people had little recourse for legal complaints. Vivek formed Timap for Justice, training paralegals throughout the country. These paralegals, often referred to as barefoot lawyers, restored the rule of law in many communities. The idea of using paralegals for social justice work is not new. What was different with Timap was that the paralegals coordinated and learned from one another. Eventually the work of Timap was recognized by the World Bank, International Crisis Group and others. In 2011, Vivek began to scale his community paralegal work to other countries. To do so, he formed Namati. Namati helps people to understand, use, and shape the laws that affect them. Namati develops innovative methods that allow grassroots legal advocates to take on challenges to justice. They spread these methodologies through an interconnected coalition of organizers. The organizers share insights and learn from one another. The coalition work for large-scale, system-changing policy changes. Once the policies are passed, the barefoot lawyers work with local communities to bring those policies to life. Social Entrepreneurship Quotes from Vivek Maru “Three billion people around the world live on lands to which they don’t have legal rights.” “Any big problem you can imagine, law and justice matters.” “Even though we’ve got tons of lawyers, we have an extraordinary crisis in terms of access to justice.” “I was dreaming about social justice since I was a kid.” “What I was learning about the law seemed so contradictory to that Gandhian spirit that I admire.” “There is a way of approaching the law that sets its sites on transformation.” “I have found that even in some of the toughest situations, well-equipped and well-supported paralegals can manage to squeeze justice out of broken systems.” “Study history.” “You might not notice law and justice if you’re not looking for it.” Social Entrepreneurship Resources: Namati: https://namati.org Namati on Twitter: https://twitter.com/GlobalNamati Namati on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GlobalNamati