Meet the Winners of the 2024-2025 Social Justice Fellowship Award
Level Justice is excited to announce the winners of the 2024-2025 Social Justice Fellowship Award: Nicole Green and Kiana Froese. Nicole and Kiana have served as Level’s Social Justice Fellows from the University of Victoria, Faculty of Law over the 2024-2025 academic year.
The Social Justice Fellowship Award recognizes an outstanding fellowship cohort that has shown exceptional work with Level’s Social Justice Fellowship Program (SJFP). As part of the program, Level recruited, trained, and funded 20 law students nationwide who worked on 11 unique social justice projects of their own design. SJFP allows students to work closely with Level staff, not only to gain an in-depth understanding of social justice issues but also to advance their legal research, analysis, and writing skills. By engaging in the SJFP, fellows have the opportunity to learn about social justice issues, engage their campuses, perform outreach to the broader community, refine their leadership skills, and become better advocates for social justice.
Nicole Green and Kiana Froese, social justice fellows from the University of Victoria, Faculty of Law.
Nicole and Kiana have been working on their social justice project, tackling barriers to social justice careers in law. Their project seeks to enhance awareness and accessibility of public interest law careers (PILC) among law students. Their research focuses on identifying key barriers and resource gaps with the goal of better understanding the challenges students face in pursuing PILC. The findings of their research are intended to inform and involve law school career offices, legal educators, and students in a collaborative dialogue to strengthen pathways into the field. Ultimately, the project aspires to support a more robust pipeline of legal professionals to public interest law careers, thereby advancing access to justice.
In Nicole and Kiana’s words:
“We were able to share preliminary findings and foster open communication regarding next steps with other Level Social Justice Fellows at the Level Social Justice Summit in Toronto. This experience allowed us to improve our research approach and learn from other like-minded law students.”
Nicole Green and Kiana Froese present their project at the 2025 Social Justice Summit hosted by Level Justice in Toronto ON.
The project resulted in meaningful dialogue among law students at the University of Victoria, Faculty of Law. Further, Nicole and Kiana engaged in thoughtful discussion with Law Careers Office representatives at the University of Victoria and Thompson River University regarding challenges law students face in pursuing public interest law careers and potential solutions to such barriers. The law career offices at Thompson River University, Faculty of Law and the University of Victoria, Faculty of Law will receive copies of the final report to assist them in promoting public interest law careers going forward. The fellows’ full report will be published in Level Justice’s Journal of Law Student Scholarship in August 2025.