Armin Salek
Youth Justice Alliance
Austin, TX
Armin is a first-generation attorney and the Executive Director of the Youth Justice Alliance. During his final semester in law school, Armin served as a law instructor at a local high school where he inspired students to dream of legal careers. That experience transitioned into work as a full-time law teacher and mentor for aspiring attorneys from underrepresented communities. After establishing the first high school legal aid clinic in the country in Southeast Austin, Armin received the Rather Prize for Education Innovation (2019), was named the Austin ISD High School Teacher of the Year (2020), and Texas Outstanding Young Lawyer of the Year (2021). After completing his Master of Education Policy from Harvard (2021), Armin established the Youth Justice Alliance which provides fellowships for aspiring first-generation lawyers that offer financial and institutional support from high school all the way to law school.
Overview
Youth Justice Alliance provides mentorships, institutional knowledge, and resources to help students achieve their academic and professional goals while working toward a more inclusive legal profession. If we invest earlier in aspiring first-generation lawyers from underrepresented populations and give students from every school the choice to pursue legal careers, then we can redistribute legal power across racial lines, offer generational wealth to new families, help address the lack of language skills in the legal profession, and produce cohorts of legally literate change agents with the tools to address the challenges they have personally experienced or witnessed.
