The Staff and Board of Directors of Friends of Farmworkers have announced that Meredith Rapkin has been selected to be the organization's new Executive Director. She will begin working full-time at Friends of Farmworkers on Tuesday, September 6, 2011.

Meredith comes to Friends of Farmworkers most recently from the immigration law firm of Goldblum & Hess, where her work focused on both employment-based and family-based immigration. For years, Meredith has been a tireless advocate on the state, local, and federal levels regarding issues that affect immigrant communities.

She is on the Board of Directors of the Pennsylvania Immigration and Citizenship Coalition, where she co-chairs the public safety committee. She also serves as a consulting attorney to the Consulate of Mexico in Philadelphia. Meredith briefly served on the Board of Directors of Friends of Farmworkers, and has been a valued collaborator of Friends of Farmworkers in its outreach to low-wage immigrant workers statewide.

Meredith was instrumental in launching the Esperanza Immigration Legal Services Project, which provides legal assistance to low-income immigrants in North Philadelphia. She co-authored an article, Taking Up the Case of the Stranger: Reaching out to Our Undocumented Neighbors, with the Rev. Luis Cortes, Jr, the President of Esperanza.

Prior to working at Goldblum & Hess, Meredith was a Clinical Teaching Fellow at the Farmworker Legal Aid Clinic at the Villanova University School of Law, where she used her Spanish language and litigation skills to oversee law students charged with the representation of farmworkers in both employment and immigration matters. Meredith served as Interim Director of that Clinic during the 2008-09 Academic Year.

She began her advocacy for low-income and immigrant communities as an Independence Foundation Fellow in 2004 - a fellowship that allowed her to work at HIAS and Council Migration Service of Philadelphia, specializing in cases involving immigrant victims of interpersonal violence. After the conclusion of that Fellowship, Meredith remained at HIAS and continued assisting immigrant women who were survivors of domestic violence under a larger grant from the Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women. Meredith also completed the FBI’s Philadelphia Community Partnership course for 2010.

Meredith received her J.D. from Temple University’s Beasley School of Law, where she was the Executive Editor of the Political and Civil Rights Law Review. Upon graduation in 2004, Meredith received a prize in International Law. She graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Middle East Studies.