Welcoming New Leadership at the Neighborhoods First Fund
We are thrilled to welcome Rini Fonseca-Sabune as the new Project Lead Consultant to the Neighborhoods First Fund, a Kornfeld Foundation partnership collaboration.
The Neighborhoods First Fund (NFF) is a donor collaborative founded in 2015 to promote equitable, inclusive, and accountable housing development and policies in New York. As a former housing rights attorney in NYC, Rini will bring a deep understanding of the opportunities and challenges facing NFF’s grantees and the broader movement for housing and land justice. She has also worked in government, as an educator, and as a nonprofit consultant and coach. Over the next few months, Rini will transition into the role, working alongside the Fund’s current coordinator Joan Byron. We take this opportunity to thank and celebrate Joan for her tireless advocacy and longtime commitment to housing justice.
More About Rini
Rini Fonseca-Sabune (she/her) has worked for over twenty years to build power and capacity in low-income communities of color, as an attorney, educator and advocate. Rini served as New York City’s first Chief Democracy Officer, developing and implementing innovative programming to promote civic engagement for all New Yorkers, particularly those who have historically been disenfranchised, including justice-involved communities, young people, and immigrants.
Prior to that role, Rini was a housing rights attorney at the Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center (now TakeRoot Justice). In this capacity, Rini supported housing organizing, working with many community-based organizations including CASA, CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, Cooper Square Committee and Neighbors Helping Neighbors, among others. Rini also previously worked as a staff attorney at the ACLU Racial Justice Program where she litigated desegregation and school-to-prison pipeline cases nationwide.
As a teacher, Rini partnered with Make the Road by Walking to develop a first-in-kind, year-long social justice seminar for high school seniors in Bushwick. Rini currently runs a boutique consulting practice providing strategic advising, organizational development and coaching, with an anti-racist and anti-oppressive framework, to mission-driven non-profit organizations.
Rini is a graduate of Harvard College, Fordham Graduate School of Education and Harvard Law School. She is from a family of immigrants from Uganda and Guyana, and grew up in Jersey City and Newark, NJ. She lives in upper Manhattan with her spouse and two children.