NCLEJ’s annual Benefit Awards Dinner will be held on Wednesday, June 7th, at the Lighthouse (Pier 61) at Chelsea Piers. Our illustrious honorees this year will include Malini Moorthy, Vice President and Associate General Counsel of Bayer U.S.; Steven M. Edwards of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP; and Nisha Agarwal, Commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. To learn more, visit our dinner page or click here to purchase tickets. We hope to see you there!
  The New York State Workers’ Compensation Board (WCB) fails to adequately protect the rights of injured or ill workers to understand and participate in hearings to determine their benefits, according to a new report released in March by NCLEJ and the Worker Protection Coalition. The report, Compensation not Open to Interpretation: Language Access in New York State Workers’ Compensation Hearings, found that the WCB provides incomplete and low-quality interpretation and, in many cases, no interpretation at all. This report identifies serious flaws in the system and offers a blueprint for policy changes that will improve the lives of New York’s workers. The full report can be found here. 
  NCLEJ and the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island reached a settlement with the Rhode Island Department of Human Services in a federal court lawsuit, filed in December 2016, challenging the Rhode Island agency’s widespread failure to process SNAP (food stamp) applications for the state’s neediest residents in a timely manner, in part due to the implementation of a faulty new computer system. The settlement in Gemmell v. Beane was approved by the federal court in February 2017. Read the news release here.
 
Congratulations to Ray Lopez, Interim Director of Programs and Director of Environmental Health Services at LSA Family Health Service, who was elected in March to NCLEJ’s Board of Directors. As a pioneering community advocate for families in East Harlem, Ray continues to play an instrumental role in implementing the mandates of the Baez v. NYCHA court settlement obtained by NCLEJ on behalf of low-income people with asthma who live in public housing that is contaminated by toxic mold. Marc Cohan, NCLEJ’s Executive Director, said, “We could not be more excited – Ray is an amazing advocate and will bring energy, enthusiasm, talent, and great spirit to our Board.”