Her Story
About Stephanie
Stephanie Richard is a professor at a law school in Los Angeles, California. She has been in the legal field since 2005 and specializes in legal services, project management, policy advocacy, and anti-trafficking within the broader areas of legal policy, academia, and human rights. After serving in the Peace Corps in Ukraine from 1998 to 2000, where she first encountered human trafficking issues, she attended American University Washington College of Law and received her JD along with a public interest fellowship. She then spent 15 years at a non-profit organization in California, beginning as a staff attorney and later directing their policy and legal services program. In that role she worked directly with trafficking survivors through groups such as Resilient Voices and served as policy counsel for the National Survivor Network. For the past 5 years she has been teaching at the university level, motivated by the need to train future advocates amid ongoing challenges in human rights protections.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Stephanie
01What do you attribute your success to?
Hard work and sticking with one thing and learning as much as I can about it and all the other people who have done the same and who have been my partners.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Human rights work and any service work is a marathon not a race. You will be better in the service to your cause if you bring a practical skill to that that might be difficult for others to achieve as well as self-care and boundaries for the work so that you're always bringing your best self to your place of work and that you're able to create the culture and values that you're working toward.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Human rights and anti-trafficking protections especially when taking on the business community are hard fought. We've made small progress but policies through this administration on human rights issues including human trafficking have been harmful and I don't think that we will recover for 25 years. That's one of the reasons that I am teaching now.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Every person should have the freedom to choose what they do in their daily life and that basic human rights are important. The workplace I work in respects those values and rights and promotes a culture that promotes it for everyone so that we appreciate the privilege and the benefits that we have and the goal is that everyone should have those things.
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