NEW YORK—The Open Society Institute U.S. Programs today announced several senior staff changes in the organization.
Jacqueline Baillargeon will become Director of the Gideon Project, effective immediately. In her former position as program officer for Gideon, Baillargeon designed a collaborative proposal to create regional back-up centers for representation of immigrants with criminal convictions, as well a major conference on criminal justice reforms to reduce wrongful convictions. She has over ten years of public interest experience in both the criminal justice and civil legal services areas.
A 1988 Harvard Law School graduate, Baillargeon has been both a public defender and a civil legal services attorney providing direct case representation to clients and supervising others doing that work. Prior to coming to OSI, she worked in the Special Litigation Section of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division doing institutional reform litigation on behalf of prisoners and the mentally ill and has taught both full time and as an adjunct professor on the law school level.
Mercer Givhan, who has been a consultant for the Gideon Project, will succeed Baillargeon as Program Officer, effective immediately. Givhan is a graduate of Morehouse College and Yale Law School, and was a staff attorney at the D.C. Public Defender Service and a litigation associate at Kaye, Scholer in New York. While in law school, Givhan worked for the Southern Center for Human Rights, a grantee of the Gideon Project.
Tanya Coke, who founded the Gideon Project in 1999 and pioneered work on issues of fairness in the justice system including the significant shift away from the death penalty, is leaving OSI. Beginning immediately, she will assume the title of Counsel to U.S. Programs at OSI, focusing on special projects in criminal justice. In October she will become a consultant. Beginning at OSI as a Program Development Fellow in the Law and Society Program, Coke was previously a trial attorney for the Federal Defender Division of the Legal Aid Society. Before her graduation from NYU Law School, she was Director of Research for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Raquiba LaBrie, who has been program officer for the Law and Society Program since 2000, will become the Director of the Community Advocacy Project (CAP), part of OSI's Criminal Justice Initiative, on September 1. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, LaBrie was an associate at the law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler before coming to OSI, and an elementary school teacher in Oakland, California for a year before going to law school. In her Law and Society work overseeing grants on access to justice and public interest law, LaBrie has worked closely with the marginalized communities that are the core of OSI's constituency and the heart of the Community Advocacy Project.
Helena Huang, the former Director of CAP at CJI, is leaving OSI on September 1 to become Program Manager for the new Jeht Foundation, where she'll continue to work as a funder in criminal justice.
Huang, a graduate of Cornell University and Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, was Deputy Director for Client Services at Women in Need, Inc. and a policy analyst for America Works before coming to OSI. She has blazed an important trail in creating CAP and providing OSI support for grassroots and other constituencies working to reduce the country's overreliance on incarceration.
Mark Schmitt will become Director of Policy and Research for U.S. Programs, effective immediately. Prior to this new position, he was Director of OSI's Program on Governance and Public Policy. Before coming to OSI in 1997 as a Program Development Fellow, Schmitt served as Director of Policy for Senator Bill Bradley. He will continue to oversee OSI's work on democracy, devolution, and media policy, and he will also assist other U.S. programs as they develop their strategies to inform policy at the national and especially the state level.
The Open Society Institute, a private operating and grantmaking foundation, is part of the network of foundations, created and funded by George Soros, active in more than 50 countries around the world.
Through our grantmaking and policy initiatives, OSI's U.S. Programs seek to restore the promise of our pluralistic democracy, and bring greater fairness to our political, legal, and economic systems. We seek to protect the ability of individuals to make choices about their lives, and to participate fully in all the opportunities—political, economic, cultural, and personal.