Aysha Pamukcu (JD 2011) first imagined herself becoming a writer when she was a child. She did become one, in a sense, and presently as Policy Fund Director at the San Francisco Foundation, she is one of the voices leading the charge to close the racial wealth gap and achieve health equity.
“I came to realize over time that what was really animating me was storytelling,” Pamukcu says. “It shows up now, especially as I’m trying to convince folks to make new alliances and partnerships. It’s the ability to paint a picture for people so they can see themselves in places and movements where they don’t normally show up.”
The 2011 graduate from USC Gould School of Law has dedicated her career to combining her passion for social justice and public interest law, and began her trajectory when she joined the International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC), founded by then-USC Gould Professor Hannah Garry, in its inaugural year. Since then, Pamukcu has gone on to lead philanthropic and policy-driven efforts to address the growing disparities in how well and how long people live.
At the IHRC, Pamukcu worked with judges at the war crimes tribunal in Cambodia, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), and later moved to the country to continue working with the Court on site.
“It was a really sobering reminder of the power and the limitations of the law,” she said. “I became interested in how far we can push the law and how we can use it as a tool of justice, but also where it falls short and how we need to essentially supplement the law with the learnings and the skills of other disciplines.”
Upon her return from Cambodia, she worked for a civil rights nonprofit, The Greenlining Institute, at the intersection of civil rights and economic justice. As she began collaborating with different teams, it became clear that different fields were talking about similar challenges in very different ways.
“In the public health world, you have ‘the social determinants of health.’ But other groups may call that the ‘racial wealth gap.’ What we were actually talking about were the same structural issues, but we weren’t using the same language to talk about them, and we certainly weren’t using the same tools to address them.”
Though she had no formal public health experience at the time, she used this wisdom in her next role as Health Equity Lead & Senior Attorney at ChangeLab Solutions, where she developed legal and policy innovations to help eliminate unjust health disparities. The daughter of immigrants — her mother from the Philippines and her father from Turkey — she grew up in the Bay Area and saw firsthand the unequal access and distribution of resources.
Inspired by her professional and personal experience, Pamukcu collaborated with UC Davis Law Professor, Angela P. Harris, to publish The Civil Rights of Health in the UCLA Law Review, to answer what would happen if public health practitioners, civil rights lawyers, and social justice advocates worked together to share their knowledge and work towards common goals.
Pamukcu says grassroots advocates are essential in helping academics and lawyers stay grounded. “They expand our imagination for what can be possible — you can’t legislate what you can’t imagine.”
In her current role at the San Francisco Foundation, she seeks to encourage philanthropy to embrace its role as a changemaker. “On my best day, I hope to not only tell a story about the future people want to see, but how they can be a part of that and what their role is in creating that future.”
Reflecting on her time at Gould, Pamukcu acknowledges the importance of extracurricular opportunities in helping her to envision the possibilities for using a law degree in a nontraditional way. She hopes that current students, especially those from underrepresented communities, will take away that there is a place for them in law school and to seek out mentors who can illuminate paths they may never have imagined.
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