Building Belonging

Join Angie Avila-Lanciotti today in her “ B-side Belonging ” episode of Building Belonging, a conversation with Dara Patel and Johnaddam Haridopolos from Job Path. Job Path is an organization that helps young adults and adults with developmental disabilities find work through the Department of Labor–recognized customized employment model. Dara dives into Job Path’s origins in the 1970s after the e...

What if the housing crisis isn't a failure of the system, but proof that it's working exactly as designed? Leah Goodridge, housing attorney, NYC Planning Commissioner, and author of  Professionalism as a Racial Construct ,  came to this episode with the receipts to prove it. She has the expertise and clarity that only comes from spending over a decade in the trenches of housing law and pol...

Everyone deserves a chance to fly! You know Wicked as a story of friendship, but do you know it as a story of Pipeline Warriors? Smashing inequitable barriers to entry, denouncing false meritocracy, allyship against systemic power hoarding – it’s all there! The deeply, deeply embedded DEI themes in Wicked make it one of our favorite cultural icons and one of our favorite movies to unpack together...

How do you go about changing the world? For this episode we brought in one of ODEIB’s inspirations – and just one of our favorite people – Professor Susan Sturm, to share her work on what it really takes to achieve structural, systemic, transformative change.  Step 1: Know your Is, your Ought, and your What Might Be.  Step 2: Articulate your values and keep them in clear sight at all times.  Step...

“You’re not helping Black people by helping them get jobs that they’re not qualified for.” “Community college students are too low-skill to benefit from pipeline programs.” “You’re doing ‘skin deep’ diversity and that’s not fair, just pick the best person for the job.” These are just a few examples of things people have actually said to our faces. Sometimes it’s so off-base, so clueless that we’re...

When a hateful voicemail message hurtled out of the clear blue sky to explode on Tanya’s sunshine-y Saturday, we knew that the kind of hate we fight against had come right up to our doorstep. This wasn’t ODEIB’s first experience with shameful hate mail, but it was the first time that we had been targeted with a message of explicit violence. We were all shaken up, there’s no way around that. In tha...

Everyone thinks they know what DEI is. But the disagreements over what DEI is, what it should do, and how it should be done stretch far into the past. Far before the attacks on DEI that characterize this moment in 2025. On this episode of the podcast we continue wrestling with our own attitudes towards these foundational questions by unpacking what, for us, constitutes the worst of the DEI that we...

In the first episode of Building Belonging season two, ODEIB dives deep into the fundamental question: What is DEI really? With the haters circling and pushback in full force, a lot of people are returning to this question to understand how to move justice forward. The team explores their individual journeys into DEI and what it means to them. As Eli puts it, this conversation seeks to address &#3...

Malaysian/British trained attorney, Christina Chelliah, connects with the Office to explore the complicated journey a foreign-trained attorney must embark on to practice law in the United States. The plight of establishing oneself in the legal profession continues to be a hard-fought challenge even after being admitted to the Bar. Join Tanya, Angie & Mary Ellen as they speak with Ms. Chelliah abou...

Today it’s time for a dose of inspiration because we’re talking to a group of young activists who have joined the fight for racial justice and equity. The ABLE initiative was started by a group of high school students. It uses art merchandise to donate to five organizations aiding the Black Lives Matter movement, encouraging youth volunteers to become active changemakers in their communities. ODEI...

In this episode of Building Belonging we talk to a few folks who have found their belonging by exploring alternative career paths outside the law. Margaret Segreti and Sam Choi join us from Bloomberg to discuss their personal journey from being practicing lawyers to discovering unanticipated roles in data analysis. Margaret and Sam emphasize the importance of being open to taking systematic, infor...

Building Belonging is joined by Eileen Travis, Executive Director of the City Bar Lawyer Assistance Program. Eileen has forty years’ experience in mental-health services and has been part of the spearhead of the legal profession’s growing awareness of and respect for mental health and well-being. Eileen has great insight to share about the history of how the legal profession has dealt with mental...

Aliza Shatzman is President and Founder of the Legal Accountability Project, a nonprofit aimed at extending support and resources to law clerks to ensure that they have a positive clerkship experience. Aliza talks about the mistreatment that she experienced as a law clerk. Her experience led her to discover the shocking lack of labor protections for clerks and the enormous power disparity between...

Ankura Consulting Group is a management consulting firm with over two thousand employees advising corporations in various industries and sectors e.g. cybersecurity, construction, litigation and human resources. Shawn Miles' and Patricia Rodriguez’s social-impact team helps companies ask themselves difficult questions about their own environments and values so that they can make sure that their peo...

Justice Rolando Acosta shares his story of growing up in the Dominican Republic and coming to New York at 14, finding opportunities by excelling academically and on the baseball field, and choosing the law and going to work at Legal Aid as a way of paying back the help that had been given to his family. Justice Acosta and his daughter Zila Acosta-Grimes compare notes on their upbringing and their...

Tanya, Angie and Mary Ellen speak with Julie Bosi and Valery Federici of Level Up Legal. They talk about coaching in the legal industry and the way that the skills of the law can run counter to the skills of well-being, and how the work of building emotional well-being dovetails with the work of DEIB. Tune in to hear about: • How coaching works in the context of the legal profession • How coaching...

Tanya, Angie and Mary Ellen speak with Ashley Bernal, Director of Research and Impact for ProInspire. Ashley was the Research Consultant for a City Bar report that made recommendations about diversifying and strengthening the pipeline to the legal profession. Ashley helped us understand the findings of the report. She also talked to us about some of the hierarchies in the educational system that w...

Tanya, Angie and Mary Ellen speak with Zila Acosta Grimes, Associate at Debevoise & Plimpton. Zila’s roots in New York’s Latinx community and legal community run deep. She shares her own immersive upbringing in those communities, and shares her playbook for building affinity groups that make inclusive and powerful spaces for communities not traditionally represented in the law. Make an impact by b...

Tanya, Angie and Mary Ellen speak with Yusuf Zakir, Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer at Davis Wright Tremaine. Yusuf shares his own journey into the DEIB space, the ways in which he invites colleagues into that space, and the way in which he has developed his firm’s approach to DEIB. Make an impact by being a part of our work: Join the City Bar (admission fee waived) using this member...

Tanya Martinez-Gallinucci, Executive Director of the Office for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging; Angie Avila, ODEIB Manager of Development and Communications; and Mary Ellen La Rosa, ODEIB Diversity & Inclusion Coordinator; speak with Lissette Duran, Senior ESG Associate at Paul Weiss. Lissette shares her experience of being lifted up in the journey of her career; how she has claimed a...

Tanya Martinez-Gallinucci, ODEIB Executive Director, Angie Avila, ODEIB Manager of Development and Communications, and Mary Ellen La Rosa, ODEIB Diversity & Inclusion Coordinator speak with Leah Goodridge about her article Professionalism as a Racial Construct and discuss how “professionalism” is used to subjugate marginalized groups. Read Leah's Article "Professionalism as a Racial Construct": bi...

James A. Lewis, V, outgoing Executive Director of the City Bar Office for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging speaks with Tanya Martinez-Gallinucci, Incoming ODEIB Executive Director, Angie Avila, ODEIB Manager of Development and Communications, and Mary Ellen La Rosa, ODEIB Diversity & Inclusion Coordinator. They discuss what Belonging means to them, the future of DEIB, the challenging wor...