Alison McCraryAlison McCrary is a social justice and human rights attorney and the Director of the New Orleans Community-Police Mediation Program at the Office of the Independent Police Monitor. She also serves as a Spiritual Advisor on Louisiana’s death row. Prior to her current work, she completed a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship where she organized and advocated to gain protections for the people and places of New Orleans’ indigenous cultural traditions including the Black Indians of New Orleans, Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, brass bands, and street musicians. She also challenged and changed policing practices and policies that threatened the use of public spaces for cultural expression. Prior to law school, Alison worked at the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana providing litigation support on death penalty cases and at the United Nations in New York monitoring the implementation of U.N. Security Council Resolutions on women, peace, and security.
She has since clerked or worked at Southeast Louisiana Legal Services, the Louisiana Voters’ Rights Network, Equity and Inclusion Campaign for the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, Orleans Parish Public Defenders Office, Louisiana’s Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the School of the Americas Watch, and Loyola University’s Community Justice Clinic. In 2009, she was an Ella Baker Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. Internationally, Sister Alison has worked on racial, educational, and economic justice issues in the favelas (slums) of Brazil and advocated for compensation for the victims of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Alison has published journal articles, written for blogs, given presentations at conferences, schools, and universities, and conducted research for institutions and academics. In 2012, the National Catholic Reporter named her as one of twelve “Women under 40 Making Change.” She has also been the recipient of the Pedro Arrupe Award for Social Justice (2010), the Louisiana State Bar Association Award for providing significant support for legal services to Louisiana’s indigent (2009), and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center Public Service Award (2009). |