2026 ACLU National Advocacy Institute

HIGH SCHOOL PROGRAM (Washington, D.C.), click here for more details

Who is eligible: High school students (15-18)
Dates: Monday, July 20th – Wednesday July 29th

COLLEGE AND COMMUNITY PROGRAM (New York City), click here for more details

Who is eligible: High school graduates (18-24)
Dates: Colleges & Communities program will return to New York City in January 2027! Stay tuned for dates.

Read A Program Alum's Story

“I went to the Institute to learn and navigate how to create a greater impact through my activism on my college campus. Not only did I grow as a organizer, activist, and person, but I found a community of people at the Institute who have become some of my closest friends, supporters, and allies." - Priscilla Takyi

Marti Gould Cummings (They, Them)
Marti Gould is a NYC based drag artist as well as a candidate for the NYC Council. They produced and starred in the Fusion television hit Shade Queens of NYC, are the host of Logos The Marti Report, and they host the hit Yahoo! Show Dragged. They serve on the board of The Ali Forney Center, Equality New York, The NYC Nightlife Council, Drag Out the Vote, and Community Board 9 in Upper Manhattan.

Merrie Cherry
Merrie Cherry is a driving force in the Brooklyn drag scene. Titled the mother of Brooklyn Drag she has truly earned that name with her activism and uplifting her community. Cherry hosts the monthly drag competition DragNET, the oldest drag event in Brooklyn, at the legendary Metropolitan Bar in Williamsburg, and she is a firm fixture at Bushwig, Brooklyn’s premier drag and performance international festival. Cherry's short documentary “Queen of Hearts.”, has made its way through the film festival circuit including, New Fest and Transformations Film Festival Berlin to name a few. Regardless what she does, this cherry is always on top.

Cristina Jiménez
United We Dream Network’s Co-Founder and Executive Director
Cristina Jiménez is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of the United We Dream Network, the largest immigrant youth-led network in the country. The organization, which is made up of over 100,000 immigrant youth and allies, has been a critical force in addressing immigration inequities across the country. Originally from Ecuador, Cristina came to the U.S. with her family at the age of 13, attending high school and college as an undocumented student. She was recently named among Forbes' “30 under 30 in Law and Policy,” one of “21 immigration reform power players” and one of 5 non-profit leaders who will influence public policy by the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Read More

Gara LaMarche
President of the Democracy Alliance
Gara LaMarche is President of The Democracy Alliance, a group of donors and movement leaders who provide millions of dollars to strengthen progressive organizations, causes and campaigns. A longtime advocate for human rights and social justice, from 2007 to 2011, he was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Atlantic Philanthropies, an international foundation focused on aging, children and youth, health, and human rights operating in Australia, Bermuda, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, South Africa, the United States, and Viet Nam. During his tenure at Atlantic, the foundation made the largest grant ever made by a foundation for an advocacy campaign – over $25 million – to press for comprehensive health care reform in the U.S.

Dr. Tommie Smith
Civil Rights Activist
During the 1968 Olympic medal ceremony for the record breaking men's 200m dash, both 1st place (gold) and 3rd place (bronze) medalists held up a black-gloved fist during the playing of their home national anthem. A silent gesture in protest of the ongoing civil rights injustices, primarily back home in America. Dr. Tommie Smith, as the first place and record-breaking medalist, has been asked numerous times, what he was doing and/or thinking in that moment. His response - “Praying.”

Today, Dr. Smith continues to travel throughout various European and Asian nations, conducting seminars, clinics and delivering speeches in those locations, as well as on domestic college campuses. Read More

Edward Snowden
Whistleblower
As a whistleblower of illegal government activity that was sanctioned and kept secret by the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government for years, he undertook great personal risk for the public good. And he has single-handedly reignited a global debate about the extent and nature of government surveillance and our most fundamental rights as individuals.

Sasheer Zamata
ACLU Celebrity Ambassador
Actress and comedian Sasheer Zamata, known for her breakout role on the cast of Saturday Night Live, is the ACLU celebrity ambassador for women's rights. In her role as an ambassador, Zamata will elevate the ACLU’s work to fight gender inequality and structural discrimination against women in employment, education, healthcare, housing, and criminal justice through advocacy and public education. The ACLU Women’s Rights Project was co-founded in 1972 by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who called women’s rights “an essential part of the overall human rights agenda.” Though strides have been made in the past several decades to advance and protect the rights of women and girls, there’s a lot left to do.

Brigitte Amiri,
Deputy Director ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project
She is currently litigating numerous cases, including leading the Jane Doe case, challenging the Trump administration’s ban on abortion for unaccompanied immigrant minors. She also represents the last abortion clinic in Kentucky, and went to trial last year after the governor threatened to close the clinic’s doors. Read More

David D. Cole,
Former ACLU National Legal Director
David Cole is the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University Law School and the former National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He writes about and teaches constitutional law, freedom of speech, and constitutional criminal procedure. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and is the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation.

Lee Gelernt
Deputy Director of the ACLU’s Immigrants' Rights Project
Lee is widely recognized as one of the country’s leading public interest lawyers and has argued dozens of important civil rights cases during his career, including in the U.S. Supreme Court and virtually every federal court of appeals in the country. He has also testified as a legal expert before both houses of Congress. His recent work is featured in the documentary “The Fight.” Read More

Dale Ho
Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
Dale Ho was the Director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, and supervised the ACLU’s voting rights litigation nationwide. He is now serving as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Dale has argued two cases before the United States Supreme Court: Trump v. New York, challenging the exclusion of undocumented immigrants from the population count used to apportion the House of Representatives; and Department of Commerce v. New York, successfully challenging the inclusion of a citizenship question on the 2020 Census, and which is featured in the award-winning documentary film The Fight. Read More

Louise Melling
ACLU Deputy Legal Director & Director of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Center for Liberty
Louise Melling is a Deputy Legal Director and the Director of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Center for Liberty, which encompasses the ACLU’s work on reproductive freedom, women’s rights, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights, freedom of religion and belief, and disability rights. In this role, she leads the work of the ACLU to address the intersection of religious freedom and equal treatment, among their issues. Read More

Alanah Odoms
Executive Director, ACLU of Louisiana
Alanah Odoms is a civil rights leader, mother, and a professional and spiritual support to countless activists across Louisiana and beyond. As the first Black woman to lead the ACLU of Louisiana in its 65 year history, she has answered the call to defend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by challenging systemic racial and gender injustice – vestiges of slavery displayed most prominently in Louisiana’s epidemic of mass incarceration, immigrant detention and deportation, and racist policing across the state. Read More

Hina Shamsi
Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project
Hina Shamsi is the Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, which is dedicated to ensuring that U.S. national security policies and practices are consistent with the Constitution, civil liberties, and human rights. She has litigated cases upholding the freedoms of speech and association, and challenging targeted killing, torture, unlawful detention, and post-9/11 discrimination against racial and religious minorities. Read More

Cecillia Wang,
ACLU National Legal Director
Cecillia Wang is the National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. She oversees over 200 lawyers and support staff in the national ACLU’s Legal Department, works in collaboration with hundreds more legal staff in the ACLU’s 54 state affiliates, and leads the ACLU’s work in the Supreme Court of the United States. Read More

Ben Wizner
ACLU Deputy Legal Director & Director of Center for Democracy
Ben Wizner is a Deputy Legal Director at the ACLU and Director of its Center for Democracy, which encompasses the organization’s work on free speech, privacy, immigrants’ rights, voting rights, human rights, and national security. Prior to assuming this role, Ben was the director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. In more than two decades at the ACLU, Ben has litigated cases involving the right to protest, freedom of expression online, government surveillance practices, airport security policies, targeted killing, and torture. Since July of 2013, he has been the principal legal advisor to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Ben is a graduate of Harvard College and New York University School of Law and was a law clerk to the Hon. Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Read More

About the ACLU

For over 100 years, the ACLU has been our nation’s guardian of liberty, working in courts, legislatures, and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and the laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country. Whether it’s achieving a 50 percent reduction in mass incarceration by 2020; challenging police brutality nationwide; establishing new privacy protections for our digital age of widespread government surveillance; or preserving the right to vote or the right to have an abortion; the ACLU takes up the toughest civil liberties cases and issues to defend all people from government abuse and overreach. With more than a million members, activists, and supporters, the ACLU is a nationwide non-partisan nonprofit that fights tirelessly in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C., to safeguard everyone’s rights. The Institute builds upon this tradition to directly engage youth in becoming civil liberties advocates in their own right.

Contact Us

Email: institute@aclu.org

The ACLU Advocacy Institute would like to thank our sponsors: