KEREN RAZ
School of Law
Juris Doctorate, May 2010
Bio and Resume (.pdf)
Keren Raz is committed to providing the legal expertise, building the infrastructure, and establishing the legal foundations that social entrepreneurs need to implement their pattern-breaking visions.
As a second year law student, Keren founded NYU's Law and Social Entrepreneurship Association, one of the first law student groups in the country to explore the intersection of law and social entrepreneurship. In its first six months, the club grew to include 13 board members and 250 general members. The club also launched its first major event with close to 200 attendees, its continuing "Inside the Social Entrepreneurs Studio" feature, and its website. In her quest to develop an expertise in the nascent social entrepreneurial law, Keren worked after her second year as a law clerk for Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin. After her first year of law school, Keren worked as a summer intern at Lawyers Alliance, a nonprofit law firm that provides business and transactional legal services to nonprofits.
Keren graduated from the University of Arizona in 2005, where she majored with honors in English and political science and minored in Chinese and Spanish. For her leadership in public service, the Arizona Daily Star named her one of the "Top Ten Up-and-Coming Tucsonans Under 25 to Watch." She also received the Honors College Dean's Award for Excellence. While in college, Keren co-founded the Magna Mentoring Project, a nonprofit organization that runs a college and scholarship mentoring program at a low-income high school in Tucson. The first cohort of Magna Scholars graduated from high school with scholarships ensuring the affordability of their undergraduate education. Over the course of four years, Keren spent most of her time mentoring students and managing 15 additional college and high school mentees.
Keren also designed the strategy and developed the implementation and sustainability plan for the program. The curriculum recently won the University of Arizona's top club programming award, and the mentor club and leadership club have doubled in size since their inception. In the summer of 2004, Keren launched a literacy campaign at a school for the mentally handicapped and the deaf in Puno, Peru and secured internet access at the local university for deaf students. With a grant from the Foundation for Sustainable Development, she established the school's first library and helped the families of the students build critically needed home libraries.
Prior to law school, Keren worked as a biotechnology writer at the Flinn Foundation, a philanthropic organization, which awards grants to nonprofit organizations in Arizona that improve the competitiveness of the state's biomedical research enterprise. She then worked as Director of Programs for Youth Re:Action Corps, now New Global Citizens. Youth Re:Action Corp's mission was to educate, empower, and invest in young people to change the world. As the first staff member hired to support the Executive Director/Founder, Keren designed a year-long program that guided high school students through the process of sustainably solving problems in their communities. She also engaged in the organization's strategic planning and oversaw program implementation in 12 schools in two states.