Alicia Arrington

Alicia Arrington is a J.D. Candidate at the University of California at Berkeley Law School, where she is pursuing her interests at the intersections of land, housing, and environmental justice. She currently serves as the founder of the Free the Land Project as part of the Student-Initiated Legal Services Projects (SLPS) program. She is also the Environmental Justice Editor of the Ecology Law Quarterly, Social Justice Chair of the Law Students of African Descent and member of many other affinity groups. Alicia has also worked as a summer legal intern at the National Resource Defense Council. She's currently planning to pursue a joint-degree in City Planning.

Prior to law school, Alicia worked for six years as a grassroots organizer in New York City. Most recently, she worked at the Red Hook Community Justice Center organizing alongside residents at Red Hook Houses to actualize their goals of making their community more safe under the Mayor's Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety. It was doing this work in a predominantly Black and Latinx public housing development recovering from Hurricane Sandy, that Alicia discovered her passion for environmental justice. In Red Hook, she learned from residents how soil contaminants, truck routes, ship idling and the overall zoning of the community impacted their health and well-being and ultimately fighting against these concerns became their number one priority. Her experiences organizing with community are what drives her to pursue a legal career in planning and environmental justice to attempt to contribute to the creation of new, healthier and more autonomous realities for Black communities around the U.S.