On October 8, Professor Carmen Huertas-Noble is being inducted into the Cooperative Hall of Fame. This is the cooperative community’s highest honor, awarded to visionary leaders who inspire and impact alternative ownership models, including worker-owned cooperatives and community land trusts.
Carmen’s work has shaped the field of community and economic lawyering and her scholarship emphasizes the importance of economic democracy. She has advanced the work and causes of organizations at the forefront of creating and supporting worker-owned cooperatives, including ROC-NY, 1 Worker 1 Vote, Green Worker Cooperatives, the New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives, and the Network for Conscious Communities.
Carmen is both honored and humbled to join the current and past awardees of this prestigious honor. Carmen is an introvert, encultured in the art of accepting accomplishments without braggadocio.
Carmen speaks with labor leaders at a NY Working Families Project event.
Carmen shared- “I’ve always been uncomfortable in the spotlight. My family and colleagues often remind me it’s about sharing my accomplishments and inspiring other people, especially given my racial and socio-economic background. Representation matters for all ages, and I am definitely a proud Afro-Latina from very humble beginnings.”
Carmen grew up in working-class neighborhoods in Staten Island and the South Bronx, where she witnessed persistent social and economic injustices.
She didn’t have much money growing up, but was sheltered from her parents’ struggle and didn’t know she was poor until high school. Her home was cozy, and her mother was a vibrant woman with a community of close friends.
Carmen remembers her mother emphasized that education was a gift within itself and not a ticket to a better place, as it lead to a more comfortable life with more opportunities to live out loud. She wasn’t trying to separate herself from her old neighborhood, but she witnessed what people would do if they didn’t have choices and had to keep food on the table.
Community economics was not where Carmen thought she would be. She went to college for social work, engaged in political science, and through this entangled path, entered law school at Fordham University. She was armed with the leadership skills needed to not shrink herself, on account of attending an all-women’s college, but notes that being a woman of color in law school is tremendously difficult, even at the best schools. She mentioned that she always carried a creeping feeling that she didn’t really belong.
CUNY CED ALUMS at our NYC Worker Cooperative Conference (from left to right) Professor Chris Adams, Senator Jamaal T. Bailey, Stephen Edel (Coalition Coordinator for NY Renews), and Professor Missy Risser-Lovings
Carmen recounted only seeing pictures of white men as she walked down her school’s hallways. It’s important to her that students see diversity in leadership and a diversity of people recognized and celebrated for their labor. This honor at the Cooperative Hall of Fame will foster exactly that for aspiring lawyers. She asserts that it’s important for clients and cooperative attorneys who are entering this space to see some reflection of themselves and notes that this also includes women.
During law school, she was focused on academics, while taking care of her mother after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was going to discontinue law school during her first year and revealed that her mom made her promise that she’d eventually finish school if she was allowed to return home to take care of her ailing mom.
Carmen at the 2018 CED 10 year Reunion
When asked how she navigated law school as a woman of color, Carmen reflected that she always put on a strong face and smile and acted like nothing impacted her because that would give people the benefit of knowing they affected her.
“I was always very friendly – but somewhat detached. I never felt that I was able to be myself fully until my third year of law school when I enrolled in the inaugural CED Clinic of my law school.”
Notwithstanding, Carmen always felt deeply connected to the academic community.
“I’m a strong believer in emergent knowledge and the fact that the more of us there contributing to this conversation, the better our outcomes will be. We’ll have taken into account factors we may not have taken into account based on our own personal blinders.”
Carmen spends a day with her family engaging in artistic recreations and attempting to embody the art.
Carmen was surprised at her affinity for Contracts and Properties classes, as those areas weren’t of main interest to her at the time. When she was a 3L, Fordham opened the doors of its Community and Economic Development Clinic, and Carmen began this work officially. Carmen noted that clinic work really animated her and made her more hopeful about the law and its ability to transform society. Despite living in the ideal, she saw many shortcomings, and her disgruntlement fueled her desire to keep exploring this area.
After graduation, Carmen declined an offer to practice housing law because she was determined to start her career in CED and, six months later, began working with the Urban Justice Center, which was not known for hiring new lawyers out of law school. While adjunct-professing for Fordham, a vacancy to develop the Community and Economic Clinic (CED) at CUNY Law arose, and it was kismet for Carmen. She became the founding Director of CUNY Law’s CED Clinic and has since trained over 200 students in cooperative law.
Carmen and her CED students in front of Main Street Legal Services
“As a clinic, we have the luxury of slowing down our practice and don’t have the pressure of having intense metrics like Legal Aid, so we take cases that will never otherwise get representation. We sometimes partake in non-legal work, like helping clients raise funds or getting them a grant, which corporate lawyers do all the time. The clients really are the ones to lead, and we use our legal knowledge to help them get there. I think clients appreciate that when we do the work with them, there’s less questioning of their values, and there’s more affirmation because we share similar experiences and values.”
Carmen really enjoys the work, even down to the simplest tasks like constructing governance documents for cooperatives.
“This is an exercise in governing. My job is to find out – who do you really want to have power, in what cases, how do you want them to exercise it, what do you want to do when there’s a conflict in the group, and how do you mitigate it?”
The clinic’s largest project currently is the Coalition to Transform Interfaith in Brooklyn, which turned three recently. Beneficial legal and non-legal work has arisen out of this project, like self-directed worker councils, the rank and file of unions, and acquainting unions with the worker co-op model. The project goes beyond worker ownership and bettering worker lives to bettering the lives of the communities in which those workers live.
Carmen poses with the CUNY Community during the 10 year CED Clinic anniversary
Carmen loves her students and deeply enjoys teaching. She’s inspired by the community and their shared public interest mission and social justice values. Students often come from the communities in which they seek to build power and create social change, which means students are changing both the face and nature of lawyering to create a diverse profession that struggles to uphold the honor of the law.
With the students at CUNY, Carmen says she is always willing to be vulnerable because she wants to model vulnerability as a point of human connectedness that leads to more empathetic lawyering and self-care. She loves her students and deeply enjoys teaching. The greatest lesson Carmen has learned from her students is to take risks. While on tenure track, her students wanted to engage with union co-op work, and she had been advised not to do anything new while working towards tenure. She decided to remain student-centered, and, with the acknowledgement of not being an expert in labor law, managed expectations and successfully earned tenure, while engaging in new areas of the law.
Carmen’s work has been groundbreaking, a testament to making space where there isn’t any, taking risks, experimenting in a landscape governed by precedent, and collaborating with folks of all backgrounds to promote emergent knowledge acquisition. This honor awards the work she’s done over the years in this field, but also supports the work of future cooperative lawyers, who may have not previously had space at the table.
Join the ceremony here, read more about her scholarship here, and follow her on Twitter @CarmenHuertas2