Home » Meet the Fellows » 2000 - 2001 Fellows » Richard Elliot Blum
"I have acquired a more nuanced perspective for how U.S. cities have evolved over time and how this history informs and affects our current situation. With a better framework of understanding, I can now refocus my energies on working to improve housing conditions and health outcomes with a clearer vision and sense of purpose."
Ray Lopez (2008 - 2009)
Environmental Program Manager
Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service Inc.
Staff Attorney
The Legal Aid Society
Richard Blum is a Staff Attorney for the Legal Aid Society, where he has served for nearly a decade in the Civil Appeals and Law Reform Unit, and the Bronx Neighborhood Office. Born in Newark, New Jersey, he holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Yale and a J.D. from New York University. Countering the detrimental policies of welfare reform in New York City, Mr. Blum has litigated groundbreaking legal cases defending the rights of welfare recipients and New York's poor, including a set of cases that obtained injunctions in federal and state courts against further staffing cuts at the City's welfare centers until the City could demonstrate that its cutbacks would not cause the illegal deprivation of benefits to needy clients. He has also helped generate class action lawsuits to challenge the City's policies of assigning all parents on public assistance to workfare instead of allowing access to education and training, as well as suits that have challenged the City's practice of valuing workfare wages at minimum wage level. A longtime advocate for anti-poverty legislation, Mr. Blum developed analyses of the federal welfare law to demonstrate why New York did not have to accept punitive welfare reform proposals. He has fought City attempts to expel homeless shelter residents for violating bureaucratic requirements of the welfare system, and has provided legislative and strategic legal counsel to organizations including the Welfare Rights Initiative, an organizing project for students on welfare at CUNY, where he is a member of the advisory board. At Columbia, Mr. Blum plans to study the historical struggles that have shaped debates over welfare reform, and gain a deeper understanding of immigration and labor migration in the United States. (The Revson Fellow's biography that appears above was last updated in 2000.)
The information listed above was provided at the time of the Fellow’s acceptance into the Revson Fellowship and may no longer be current.
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