On december 11, 2014, my group and I interviewed a man named Vincent Warren. Vincent Warren is the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights(CCR). CCR is a very active organization that is dedicated to defending and advancing human and civil rights. Before joining CCR, Warren was a national senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, where he litigated cases involving racial profiling, police brutality, and criminal justice. Overall, Warren is very experienced in the legal field of civil and human rights. Before our interview started, we took a quick tour of the office and met many different lawyers that were working on their own respective cases or issues. During our interview we learned about various things about CCR and their recent work with communities like Ferguson. We also learned about the struggles and difficulties of running a social justice organizations such as CCR. When asked about the hardest part of his job, Warren said “the biggest obstacle in our line of work is funding. We are a non-profit organization, so we don’t get money from our clients for representing them.” This was interesting to us because during all of our interviews we did not receive this point of view. Warren also said that “the second biggest obstacle is that so many things need changing and fixing, but most people are either not aware of what is going on or they don’t see why they should get involved.” I found this to be very interesting because choosing to participate is one of the biggest problems of achieving social justice. This was a great experience for our group because we got to learn a lot from our interview and we also got to go on a tour of an active law office, where lawyers were working on social justice issues that are similar to us.
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