Britt, a white woman with short curly brown hair, is seen from the shoulders up. She is smiling.

Britt Dorton

she/her/hers

Anthropologist, activist, accessibility consultant, and inclined towards alliteration.
And now, a law student.

[email protected]

i am currently available for accessibility/disability workshops and trainings, as well as consults regarding accessibility. If you're interested in booking me, please send me an email.

Salutations!

[For a more formal introduction, click here for my resume.
My name is Britt! In addition to being a law student, i am an advocate for disability justice and a more accessible future, as well as a student of the abolition movement. i've led workshops and trainings on accessibility and disability for schools, university professors, and small businesses. My advocacy-based social media content reaches thousands daily across various platforms, and i bring an intersectional lens to the work i do. i graduated from The University of Chicago with honors in 2020 and my research interests tend towards medical anthropology, experiences of pain, disability studies, solitary confinement , and prison abolition.i use lowercase "i" in my personal communications - it's a little textual reminder not to elevate myself. Outside of my work, i love public transit, making food for friends (or making food in an attempt to make friends), and cheesy surfing movies. i create content, crochet sweaters, and throw one-woman dance parties in my apartment.

CURRENTLY

3L JD Candidate @ Michigan LawStudent Attorney, Michigan Innocence Clinic

RECENT WORK

ARCHIVE OF EXPERIENCE

Where i've been, what i've done, and how i've grown

Summer Legal Intern, ACLU Disability Rights Program
i spent my 2L summer conducting research and writing legal memos to support ongoing impact litigation. Topics included disability discrimination in police responses to mental health crises and theories of disability discrimination under existing ADA law.Student Attorney, Michigan Innocence Clinic
MIC is a clinical program at Michigan Law School focusing on wrongful conviction cases. It was the first innocence project in the country not to focus exclusively on DNA. As a student attorney, i was responsible for managing seven wrongful conviction cases and advancing investigations or litigation over the course of the academic year. i questioned persons of interests, wrote motions for appellate court, and gave my first oral argument on record.
SKILLS: Oral advocacy, client and witness interviewing, investigative research, appellate brief and motion writing
ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Argued before the Michigan Court of Appeals on a motion for DNA testing resulting in a per curiam decision for our clientSummer Law Clerk, Disability Rights California
During my 1L summer i was a law clerk for for DRC's Investigations Unit. DRC is California's Protection & Advocacy agency. The IU investigated abuses against disabled people in California jails, prisons, immigration detention centers, and locked treatment facilities. i wrote legal research memos, policy briefs, and public comments on issues including criminal record relief, immigration detention policies for people with disabilities, and Protection & Advocacy organization powers. i also conducted client interviews during site visits to monitor locked treatment facilities.
SKILLS: Legal writing, all-staff presentations and training, client interviews
ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Developing a memo and presentation on policies and best practices for relieving access barriers to criminal record relief for people with disabilities.Paralegal, Action Injury Law Group
At Action, i handled client intakes and often served as the main point of contact to provide clients and their loved ones with updates and emotional support throughout the journey to trial. i also prepared and submitted electronic filings, deposition notices, and FOIA requests; as well as conducting legal research and administrative support for the firm.
SKILLS: Client communication, legal editing, case managementDevelopment Assistant, Uptown People's Law Center
In this position i was responsible for managing all applications, budgeting, and reporting for 11 grants throughout the year. i also oversaw our payroll, accounting, HR, and donor relations; i created content for our social media pages and website and kept both up to date. When we took on a new intern, i assisted in supervising in training her.
SKILLS: Grantwriting, donor relations, social media management
ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Securing $90K in new grant funding, using social media to ensure UPLC could afford to send a mass mailing to all prisoners in IDOC that would allow them to receive stimulus checksPrisoners' Rights Program Assistant, Uptown People's Law Center
After interning in the Prisoners' Rights Program, i came on part-time thanks to grant funding. My daily tasks including reading, logging, and responding to roughly 100 letters from prisoners each week, conducting research on policies affecting currently and formerly incarcerated individuals in Illinois, assisting with legal calls and visits with incarcerated clients, performing intakes, and providing administrative support.
SKILLS: Attention to detail, working with system-impacted individuals, legal research, legal intakes
ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Creating a guide for recently released folks to obtain state IDs, identifying major issues in a case of abuse in prison, building trust and strong working relationships with system-impacted individualsVice President of Administration, University of Chicago Student Government
Along with the President and the Vice President for Student Affairs, i was part of the CARE Slate, the first all-female executive slate to be elected to student government in the history of the University of Chicago. i oversaw our $2M budget, communicated with administrators, helped plan and lead town hall sessions, and advocated for policies promoting inclusion, accessibility, and mental health on campus.
SKILLS: Creating meeting agendas, planning large-scale events, communications within and between various teams and departments
ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Creating a town hall series that had triple the attendance of events sponsored by administrators, re-opening communication between students and administrators for the first time in years, utilizing our budget surplus to assist students in crisis during COVID-19Resident Assistant, University of Chicago
At UChicago, undergraduate students were sorted into "houses" that functioned as close-knit academic and social communities. Undergraduate RAs, along with their supervisory graduate student Resident Heads, lived in the houses with residents, ate their meals at the house table, and provided opportunities for bonding and support. i fostered a diverse and inclusive community for 80+ students, developed programming and created events, and responded to crises with professionalism and compassion.
SKILLS: Conflict resolution, the ability to work in small and large teams, crisis support (including mental health, substance abuse, and sexual misconduct), community buildingAccessibility Student Advisory Board, University of Chicago
As a member of the University of Chicago's inaugural Accessibility Student Advisory Board, i advocated for changes to university policy to improve accessibility and worked with the office for Student Disability Services to bring attention to the issues disabled students faced.Research Assistant, The Mason Lab, University of Chicago
During my time as a psychology major, i worked in a neuroscience lab on campus that studied empathy through rats. While i ultimately decided that lab life was not for me, i learned a great deal and benefited greatly from the mentorship i received there.Development and Outreach Intern, Human Rights Watch
At HRW i conducted prospect research, assisted with event planning and coordination, edited briefs and reports for various departments, took meeting minutes, developed agendas, and maintained donor relations. i became familiar with software and databases such as RelSci, WealthX, Raiser's Edge, and NOZAsearch.

VOLUNTEER & PRO BONO

Prison Liberation CollectiveSentence Commutation Pro Bono ProjectPro bono grant writer for multiple non-profits led by formerly incarcerated individuals

MY FAVORITE FAILURES

Too often we are pressured to present a perfect version of ourselves. i know that my story is far from flawless, and i believe i've learned far more about who i am and who i want to be from my failures than from my successes. In the spirit of transparency and vulnerability, here are a few of the times i've missed the mark.

Open Access
In 2018, i co-founded a non-profit with the goal of providing resources and support to Chicago Public Schools students with disabilities and their families. We received a grant to support our work, but as all three of us involved in the project were full-time students and working part-time, we quickly discovered that we did not have the capacity to run Open Access at the level we had hoped. While we created resource guides and collaborated with CPS educators to prepare for a launch within the community, we were forced to keep pushing back our launch date due to our external obligations. i let my passion for the project prevent me from being realistic about my capacity to do the work and ended up burning myself out. From this experience, i learned the importance of setting realistic goals and building capacity. While we all cared deeply about this project, the reality was that we didn't have the time to give it the attention it needed. i've learned to be better at delegating and setting deadlines, as well as the importance of asking for help and support early on.Uptown People's Law Center
During my time as a Development Assistant, i was responsible for all of our grant applications and reports. My predecessor shared a calendar of grant deadlines with me that i worked off of, but there was one crucial deadline missing. Because i failed to double-check that every grantor we applied to had a corresponding deadline, we were unable to apply for a grant that had been a source of funding for UPLC for several consecutive years. i doubled my efforts for our future applications and was able to secure enough funding to compensate for that loss, but it put a strain on our budget for a couple of months. i learned that the level of attention to detail my job demanded was even higher than i had anticipated, and that i needed to establish consistent communication with my supervisor to prevent things like this from slipping through the cracks and to ensure that information from past employees could be carried over.

OF INTEREST

Hobbies
Crochet, painting, spoken word poetry, sending snail mail, stress-baking, swimming, portrait photography, scavenger hunts
Factoids
• i've been skydiving (10/10 would recommend)
• Growing up, i was a three-sport varsity athlete: competitive fiction writing, academic quiz bowl, and the captain of the swim team
• i annually participate in the world's largest scavenger hunt - my favorite items to complete have been a Michelin tire signed by a Michelin star chef and a version of CTA announcements from a self-aware Red Line Train recorded by Lee Crooks himself
• My hometown's unofficial mascot is the Flying Pig
In the News
•NBC
•CNBC
•Al-Jazeera's AJ+
•MTV News