Our 2025-2026 Jacob Volkman Human Rights Fellowship was awarded to Alyssa Harrilal for her groundbreaking work giving voice to survivors of child trafficking and her contributions to Herstory Writers Network, as a writer, as a workshop facilitator, and as a mentor for Herstory writers as they come out of jail.
As a sub-grantee of a prestigious ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) Writing Beyond the Prison digital justice initiative led by Ivan Kilgore, an incarcerated individual serving a life sentence in Inwood State Prison in Blythe California. Herstory has been charged with preparing and uploading a curriculum developed by Erika Duncan, Herstory’s Founder and Creative Director onto the EDOVO learning platform used by 900,000 prisoners nationwide.
During Alyssa’s fellowship year, she will serve as Erika Duncan’s assistant in creating inspirational video content to motivate the prisoners to write their own stories, allowing viewers to meet survivors in the process of shaping their stories for healing and change, as they progress through ten-module curriculum that Ivan Kilgore piloted with 25 men in his prison yard to resounding success, with a focus on restoration and giving back. She will continue to develop her own survivor memoir, while working with young women just emerging from human trafficking, court-involved youth, court judges and organizations using the emerging stories for advocacy in a larger campaign. As the curricular modules are uploaded, she will help to pilot each one with the women working with Herstory in the jails and the community.
We invite you to visit Alyssa’s page on Herstory’s Beyond Bars website to read her writings.
More about the Jacob Volkman Human Rights Fellowship Program
Thirty years ago, Jacob’s daughter, Erika Duncan, embarked on new mission, to establish a community writing project to give voice to the most isolated and marginalized people on Long Island, incarcerated and free.
Drawing on the storytelling techniques she had learned from her father when she was a child—meant to startle those who were bigoted and cruel into awareness and empathy— she designed a pedagogy of action, empathy and inclusion, which is alive to this day.
71 years have passed since Jacob told his eight-year-old daughter the story of his participation in the liberation of Buchenwald. It was one of those indelible moments when the commitment to fighting injustice is passed down. It was one of those moments of teaching the perpetuation of the struggle that Jacob would carry on into his 96th year.
Coming out of a tradition of teachers and healers, starting with his grandfather, Berish Volkman, a renowned rabbi/ healer in the tradition of Maimonides, Jacob spent his life working for fair housing, racial justice and human rights. Whether he was managing a public housing project while working with the early settlement houses on the Lower East Side, or creating a union, whether he was doing neighborhood organizing or teaching sociology, a second career he began when most people were retiring, he was always on the frontlines of change. He was always a very quiet revolutionary, engaging in conversations and actions in a way that drew other people in, but a forceful one too in a way that didn’t alienate people.
It is in his name that his descendants have come together to create a program within Herstory where elders and young people will come together around a current human rights issue, to write side by side, with the goal of using their stories to change hearts, mind and policy, with a shifting focus for each year.
We invite you to watch this video made toward the end of our first pilot year during the height of the Pandemic, through the creation of an ongoing online workshop, “From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter,” engaging former sharecroppers, student activists, immigrant human rights and philanthropic leaders and young scholars from Long Island, South Carolina, Arkansas, Washington DC, Maryland, New York City, Minnesota, California and more.