Andrew David Friedman

Andrew is Founding Director of the Initiative for Community Power at NYU School of Law. The Initiative is an ambitious, multi-faceted effort to combine the weight and assets of a global academic institution with the nimble, community-grounded tools of advocacy and organizing. Its goal is to catalyze understanding, innovation, and high-impact work in order to accelerate social change towards a more equitable, democratic, and racially just society. The Initiative combines scholarship, field-building, experiential education, academic convenings, internships and fellowships to examine inequality and anti-democracy, and the links between the two. The Initiative works to challenge and disrupt both.

Andrew is also a co-founder and Senior Director of Strategy for The Action Lab, a sanctuary for strategy and a gathering place to create a just future. To envision and realize the goal of freedom and dignity for all, the Action Lab generates opportunity—to rejuvenate, to dream, to build community, to learn, to create, to innovate, and to take courageous action. The Lab fosters cross-discipline, cross-movement spaces to lift out of the immediate, imagine our way decades into the future, expand our conception of what’s possible and build the collective muscle and connections to drive towards that vision.

Previously, Andrew was the founding Executive Director of the Center for Popular Democracy. The Center for Popular Democracy(CPD) promotes equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with innovative community-based organizations, local and state networks, and progressive unions across the country. While at CPD, Andrew helped co-found Local Progress, a national network of thousands of progressive local elected officials. Before CPD, Andrew spent fifteen years building Make the Road New York into the leading democratically-run, immigrant-led community organization in New York State. After co- founding Make the Road in 1997, Andrew helped grow the organization from a small, volunteer-run effort to an $8 million organization with over 10,000 members, 100 staff, and four community-based centers in New York City and Long Island. Andrew helped oversee all aspects of Make the Road’s work, including organizing, legal services, adult literacy, workforce development, operations and finance departments of MRNY.

Andrew has been awarded the Union Square Award of the Fund for the City of New York, the Cornerstone Award of the Jewish Funds for Justice, and the Community Health Leaders Award of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Andrew was a Skadden Public Interest Fellow, a Senior Fellow at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy and a Wasserstein Fellow at Harvard Law School. He has worked as an adjunct professor in New York University School of Law’s Clinical Program, a lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School and has taught at NYU’s Wagner School for Public Service, Cardozo School of Law and the New School for Social Research, and serves on the Board of Directors of Make the Road Action, The Action Lab, Local Progress, Hester Street, and the Editorial Advisory Board of The Forge. Andrew is a magna cum laude graduate of Columbia College and a cum laude graduate of the New York University School of Law.

Most importantly, Andrew is the overjoyed father of three spectacular boys: Guillermo, Matias and Maximo Friedman-Villegas.