Wendy Pollack

Wendy Pollack is the founder and director of the Women's Law and Policy Project (WLPP) at the Shriver Center. The WLPP draws on the experiences of women and girls and brings those experiences to the forefront in the Shriver Center's analysis of poverty and the development of solutions to end poverty permanently. Pollack has been working extensively on public benefits and work supports, workforce and economic development, education, employment, family law, violence against women and girls, gender equity in schools, and other issues affecting low-income women and girls, on the local, state, and federal level. She is the editor of WomanView, a newsletter on developments in legal issues affecting low-income women and girls. Her most recent publication is a chapter in the three-volume set, Bringing Human Rights Home (Praeger Publishers 2007), which chronicles the history of human rights in the United States from the perspective of domestic social justice activism. Before coming to the Shriver Center in May 1996, she worked on the welfare law team at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago and as one of its neighborhood staff attorneys. Before becoming a lawyer, she was a union carpenter and cofounder of Chicago Women Carpenters in 1979 and Chicago Women in Trades in 1982. She serves on the board of directors of the Chicago Jobs Council. She is a 1989 graduate of Harvard Law School.