Ruth Cusick

Co-Founder

pronouns: she/her

Ruth Cusick is grateful to have been taught to be a movement lawyer from her close organizing mentors and to be a part of such hopeful, beautiful and transformative work. Ruth was raised in the queer faith community of Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), with social justice and human rights as formative pillars in her upbringing.

Ruth began her legal career in 2008 as a Skadden Fellow at Mental Health Advocacy Services. While a fellow, she represented students with significant histories of trauma who were criminalized and pushed out of school, most of them Black students impacted by the child welfare and delinquency systems. She also supported parent leaders at CADRE in monitoring school climate transformation, culminating in Redefining Dignity in Our Schools: A Shadow Report on School-Wide Positive Behavior Support Implementation in South LA, 2007-2010. After CADRE’s initial report, Ruth continued to serve as ongoing legal support to CADRE’s organizing work, collaborating on several more human rights shadow reports and policy efforts. She has also worked in movement solidarity support for partners dismantling juvenile probation in LA County. From 2011-2021, she helped lead the Statewide Education Rights Project at Public Counsel, combining direct service, movement lawyering and legislative reform for racial justice in schools. Ruth has presented at numerous conferences on criminalization in schools and was one of the editors of the Dignity in Schools Campaign Model Code on Education and Dignity: Presenting a Human Rights Framework for Schools.