Lydia Ghuman

Lydia Ghuman (she/hers) graduated from Harvard Law in 2023 and participated in the Institute to End Mass Incarceration in 2021. Lydia also participated in Harvard Defenders, The Crimmigration Clinic, The Housing Clinic, The International Human Rights Clinic, and summer internships with the Community Justice Project and Civil Rights Corps while in law school. She is now an Equal Justice Works Fellow at Community Justice Project in Miami, FL supporting the local organization Beyond the Bars with their various campaigns.

Lydia is dedicated to helping build local movements that are led by those who are directly impacted and that build the freedom and autonomy of those who are directly impacted, particularly in areas of economic justice, criminal legal reform, land reform, and border abolition. This dedication comes from her family, who taught her how to dream and showed her a life that never made her doubt that immense, positive change could be created by small groups of everyday people. Her paternal grandparents are Sikhs from modern-day Pakistan who survived the Partition of India and her paternal family in India are under-paid farmers who played a key role in organizing the Farmers Protest in Punjab from 2020-2021. Her mother is from Ethiopia, and her maternal relatives often organized against government injustices. She and her immediate family grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, with parents who were recent immigrants. They were deeply impacted by policies that facilitated the criminalization of poverty, the over-policing of minority neighborhoods, and gentrification/displacement. Lydia’s life made her aware of global issues relating to low-wage work, over-policing, land conflicts, and border regimes, allowed her to see them as interconnected, and showed her that community-led movements are the solution.