# Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) Founded in **2002** in New York City by **[[Dean Spade]]**, named in honor of [[Sylvia Rivera]] — who died of liver cancer earlier that year. SRLP provides **free legal services to low-income transgender, intersex, and gender-nonconforming New Yorkers**, with a specific focus on the populations Rivera herself spent her life advocating for: trans people of color, homeless trans youth, sex workers, and people in the criminal-legal system. ## What SRLP Does The organization's practice areas include: - **Direct legal representation** in immigration, public benefits, housing, ID-document changes, employment discrimination, prison and detention, and HIV-related cases - **Movement-lawyering training** for law students and legal workers in the SRLP collective model - **Policy advocacy** — particularly around prison conditions, public benefits access, and identity-document reform - **Coalitional organizing** with other trans-led, women-of-color-led, and incarcerated-people-led organizations ## The Collective Model SRLP is structured as a **non-hierarchical workers' collective** with no executive director — an organizational form deliberately chosen to mirror the political principles Sylvia Rivera articulated about who should lead trans-political organizing. This is unusual in the legal-nonprofit world and has made SRLP an influential model for the broader movement-lawyering tradition. ## Place in the Vault The Sylvia Rivera Law Project is the **operational realization** of Sylvia Rivera's 1973 "Y'all Better Quiet Down" critique — that the gay-rights movement was leaving trans, poor, and street-economy queer people behind. SRLP exists specifically to address that gap, and its continuing operation 25 years after Rivera's death is one of the most direct organizational legacies of her political vision. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Sylvia Rivera]]