About Us
The Social Movement Support Lab is dedicated to providing grassroots-led racial justice movements with the multidisciplinary support they need to dismantle key drivers of systemic racism and create transformative social change. It has been designed around the research, organizing, policy, legal, and communications needs of such movements. We bring together lawyers, policy experts, communications professionals, statisticians, economists, artists, sociologists, social workers and other experts around the shared purpose of building power within communities of color. Thus we help to dramatically expand the bandwidth of our community partners and level the severely unequal playing field they face as they address systems of mass criminalization and incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline, and over-investment in the criminal legal and immigration enforcement systems alongside under-investment in education, public health, and community well-being.
The Social Movement Support Lab is led by Jim Freeman and Marco Nuñez.
Jim Freeman
Jim Freeman is a racial justice movement lawyer who works with communities of color across the U.S. to address issues of systemic racism and create positive social change. He has supported dozens of grassroots-led efforts to end mass criminalization and incarceration, achieve education equity, dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline, protect immigrants’ rights, and create a more inclusive and participatory democracy. He is the author of Rich Thanks to Racism: How the Ultra-Wealthy Profit from Racial Injustice (2021).
Freeman was formerly a Senior Attorney at Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization, where he directed the Ending the Schoolhouse-to-Jailhouse Track project. He served under President Obama as a Commissioner on the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans. Freeman is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Harvard Law School, and was an editor on the Harvard Law Review. He is a former Skadden Fellow, clerked for Judge James R. Browning on the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, and has been an Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He currently teaches “Movement Lawyering” and “Supporting Social Movements” at the University of Denver.
Marco Nuñez
Marco Nuñez’ career spans over twenty-years in labor and community organizing and runs the gamut of roles from organizer to executive director. A passionate advocate for social justice, he has a long record of impactful, transformative policy and labor campaigns across a broad range of issues.
His extensive background in the non-profit sector includes working for organizations dedicated to racial equity and social justice causes, such as: Padres y Jóvenes Unidos, as the Organizing Director; El Centro Humanitario day labor center in Denver, as the Executive Director; and El Centro de Igualdad y Derechos, as the Worker Justice Coordinator. At each organization, he worked closely with members and community allies to effect systemic reforms including state-wide legislation in Colorado to reform the role of police in K-12 schools and strengthen legislation against wage theft. In New Mexico, he participated in a successful campaign to reform the Department of Workforce Solutions to better serve non-English-speaking and other vulnerable populations susceptible to wage theft.
Additionally, he has organized in the labor sector for nearly fifteen years with the United Food and Commercial Workers, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 105, and the National Education Association - New Mexico. Over this time, he supported and led over twenty union external and internal campaigns. From forming new, local unions to advancing successful contract negotiations and issue campaigns, he is committed to the development and participatory practices that harness the collective strength of affected workers.
A Mexican immigrant and first-generation graduate from the University of Colorado Boulder, he studied International Affairs, with a focus on transnational labor in the US, particularly from Mexico.