Laurel Dumont, Founder & Executive Director

Living and working in Newark as a teacher, lawyer, and social worker, Laurel Dumont has built a network across professional and demographic lines. Ability to work with  diverse communities and elected leadership and a bent for linking needs and resources earned her a reputation as a Connector. Uniquely positioned to build bridges and facilitate collaboration to generate trust and momentum around change, Laurel decided to use her skills and experience to launch The Center for Collaborative Change, an innovative intermediary organization built to be hands-on with both community consultation and policy and program development.

Laurel has nearly a decade of involvement with the Newark community since she was placed in Newark as a 2000 Teach For America Corps Member and taught fifth grade at Thirteenth Avenue School.

Her work in Newark since leaving the classroom has included a number of professional and volunteer projects that engage community members in identifying needs and collaborating around solutions. These include working to create a school-based health clinic at the school where she taught, and helping to create and then overseeing the Newark Reentry Legal Services (ReLeSe) program that has now served over 1,200 clients with civil legal barriers to successful community reintegration after incarceration.

Before starting the Center, Laurel worked as a staff attorney at Essex-Newark Legal Services, representing tenants in eviction actions and administrative hearings, and as Legal & Policy Counsel at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, where her work included legal and community-based approaches to court reform and driver’s license restoration.

She presently serves on the boards of Volunteer Lawyers for Justice and the Newark Educators’ Community Charter School. She has a B.A. in Government from Wesleyan University and a Juris Doctor (J.D.) and Masters in Social Work (M.S.W.) from the University of Michigan.