anneke dunbar-gronke*

anneke dunbar-gronke joins the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law as a Skadden Fellow for Fair Housing and Community Development. In this role, anneke’s work centers on ensuring Black people in Baltimore can stay in their homes and building toward a future of permanently affordable housing and community control over housing and land. Tactically, anneke will provide direct representation to low-income Black tenants facing eviction proceedings, support the development of tenant-led participatory organizing and provide legal support for housing cooperatives and community land trusts by and for low-income Black Baltimoreans.

Prior to joining the Lawyers’ Committee, anneke served as a law clerk to Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of the District Court for the District of Columbia. Before clerking, anneke worked as a Litigation Fellow at the plaintiff side employment firm Sanford Heisler Sharp, LLP, where anneke worked primarily on race-based employment discrimination matters and on Miranda v. Barr, a case brought in partnership with the ACLU and the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights (CAIR) Coalition. In that case, the district court ultimately held that immigration judges in all future Maryland bond hearings for individuals held in immigration detention pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a) must place the burden of proving the individual is a flight risk on the government and also consider both the individual’s ability to pay a bond amount and the individual’s suitability for release on alternative conditions of supervision.

anneke graduated from Columbia University with their B.A. in Political Science. They graduated from Harvard Law School in 2019 and, while a law student, they served as an Articles Editor and organizer of the Prison Abolition Symposium at the Harvard Law Review, a Law and Social Change Fellow, co-chair of the Harvard Black Law Students Association’s (HBLSA) political action committee, a student attorney and Chair of Outreach with the student-led criminal defense organization Harvard Defenders, and a core organizer of the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign. Through their work with HBLSA and as a Law and Social Change Fellow, they established partnerships with community organizers fighting gentrification in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, MA, and developed public record request training materials in connection with that organizing. Additionally, as a core organizing member of the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign, they helped pivot the original research project into an organizing campaign to divest Harvard’s $40 billion endowment from all companies that profit from human caging, which campaign has led to significant campus awareness of prison abolition and a student-led lawsuit against Harvard for misrepresenting the nature of its investments to donors. As a student, anneke also participated in the Predatory Lending and Consumer Protection and Criminal Justice Institute clinics.

Outside of the practice of law, anneke has previously worked with Planned Parenthood Federation of America on the organization’s Southern Access Project and the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies in New Orleans, LA as a youth participatory action research facilitator and a qualitative research associate. Additionally, they have organized with the New Orleans and Washington D.C. chapters of Black Youth Project 100, NOLA to Angola, and the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition. They currently serve on the steering committee for the Cherry Hill Food Coop in Baltimore, MD, and the board of Beyond Binary Legal.

Bar Admissions: Admitted in District of Columbia and Maryland. Admitted to the US District Court for the District of Columbia.