March 20, 2025

Grantee Partner Spotlight: Sur Legal Collaborative

by Shelly Anand & Iman Ali

Ms. Foundation is proud to support our grantee partners, who are at the forefront of organizing and creating solutions that improve people’s lives and bring us closer to achieving a true democracy. The insight and perspective they provide is invaluable. The Q&A below was generated by Sur Legal Collaborative Co-Founder, Shelly Anand, and Development & Growth Strategist, Iman Ali.

Sur Legal Collaborative is an immigrant and worker rights nonprofit legal organization based in Atlanta, Georgia. They seek to democratize legal knowledge and provide legal support to movements fighting for economic, racial, and social justice in the South. Sur Legal Collaborative is an Activist Care & Collaboration Fund grantee partner.

What brought you to this work? 

Shelly Anand: I am the daughter of Indian immigrants and the granddaughter of refugees from the Partition of India and Pakistan, born and raised in Georgia. My family history and lived experiences have provided me with a personal connection to the implications of diaspora, displacement, and coloniality. My parents faced violence and discrimination – from my father having “go back to Iran” spray-painted on the hood of his car, to racist store clerks ridiculing and humiliating my mother. I came of age during 9/11, when my community experienced discrimination and hate crimes. I am a survivor of sexual assault and have experienced race, gender, and pregnancy discrimination in the workplace. All of these experiences brought me to the work of fighting and advocating alongside immigrant communities in the Deep South for the last 14 years, as a bilingual staff attorney with Georgia Legal Services Program, a litigator with the U.S. Department of Labor, and an immigrant rights attorney with Tahirih Justice Center. In October 2020, I co-founded Sur Legal Collaborative, an immigrant and worker rights nonprofit legal organization, in response to COVID-19, when immigrants were deemed essential workers yet knew nothing about their labor rights, particularly in the safety and health context.

How do you connect/collaborate in your community? Who are your key partners? 

Three months into our founding, our organization joined a rapid response in the wake of one of the worst workplace tragedies in recent history, when six poultry workers were killed in an entirely preventable nitrogen leak. For the last four years, we have worked with this community of poultry workers to educate them about their labor rights, assist them with filing labor complaints with various labor agencies, and help them secure immigration status. These workers, the majority of them immigrant women and single mothers, are leaders in their community and have joined our newly formed Worker Advisory Committee to inform our programs and ensure that we are being responsive to the most pressing needs in their community. 

We work extensively with immigrant rights, labor rights, and abolitionist organizations here in Georgia and across the country. Our priority is connecting immigrant workers and the organizers who support them to resources and knowledge so that they can fight for fair and safe workplaces and get the immigration-related protection they need from deportation. Our key partners include Migrant Equity Southeast, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, among others.

What are you learning or what are you teaching? 

Our core programmatic work includes Popular Education and Training programs, which strive to educate, uplift, and mobilize workers by providing them with the legal knowledge and tools they need to hold abusive employers and oppressive systems accountable. We have held trainings on workers’ labor rights, regardless of immigration status for workers and organizers, with an emphasis on educating workers and organizers about the occupational safety and health hazards that are most prevalent in the high-hazard, low-wage industries. We also work to remind workers that they have legal rights ranging from the right to proper personal protective equipment (PPE) to collectively organizing against labor abuses ranging from rampant sexual assault to wage theft. These abuses are especially prevalent among workers who labor in some of the most dangerous conditions and undervalued roles in factories, agriculture, and more. 

Every day, we are taught new lessons of how carefully and arduously marginalized workers are fighting for basic precautions, despite fearing the imminent possibility of their livelihood being stripped away for doing so. We are enriched by these lessons, which we carry with us daily to continue our advocacy even more fiercely, adapted to the real needs of our clients and communities.

Tell us about a recent victory or something you’re proud of?

We recently won a settlement that required the California-based Egreen Transportation Corporation to pay over $580,000 in unpaid wages, damages, and other penalties for denying pay to immigrant workers. Working alongside three mission-aligned partner organizations, including Migrant Equity Southeast, Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Southern California, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, we provided language support in Mandarin Chinese and helped these workers in their pursuit of federal complaints against the abusive employer. This case was a testament to the interconnectedness of labor abuse and immigration issues, and pronounced the need for the disruption and dismantling of the labor-abuse-to-deportation pipeline. Earlier this year, our work was uplifted in a Los Angeles Times article titled “Immigration crackdown could deter workers from reporting hazards, advocates warn,” which shared the transformative potential of our strategy that secures labor-based immigration relief for workers who have been abused, exploited, and/or violated within their workplace. Citing our work in the wake of the deadly nitrogen leak in Gainesville, GA in 2021, we shared that, now more than ever, it is critical to secure temporary protections from deportation for workers at-risk.

What can philanthropy do better and/or how can individuals be helpful allies? 

Better philanthropy starts here, with questions like this one that center the needs of the organizations, people, and collectives doing the work. Philanthropic processes tend to put the responsibility of proving their worthiness on the grant-seeker, rather than placing the initiative on grantors/funders to proactively seek strategic and values alignment. Through building more trusting relationships between grant-seeking and grantmaking institutions, there is potential to shift the paradigm of giving from one that is transactional, to one based on reciprocity, mutual investment, and solidarity. This trust can be earned in various ways, like simplifying (or even eradicating) complex applications to allow the organization to commit their time and resources to doing the programmatic work, rather than reporting and writing about it. Similarly, providing organizations with the flexibility of unrestricted funding enables them to remain nimble and remain (or become) accountable to the communities they serve, rather than an investor. This further fosters trust, by demonstrating a funder’s confidence in a team’s ability to generate community-responsive, transformative solutions to pressing problems. Additionally, providing opportunities for sustained or multi-year support can cultivate similar trust by providing the much sought-after stability and sustainability in a landscape where security can feel novel.

What gives you hope? 

Despite imminent challenges, persistent hostility, and looming threats posed by hegemonic power, hope must persist. In moments where the weight of the world feels particularly heavy, I think of Mariame Kaba’s mantra, “hope is a discipline, and we have to practice it every day.” Practicing hope happens when communities come together and are empowered to make change through bold, generative, and radical ideas. Dr. Angela Davis says “isolated individuals [will] always be powerless, we will never have the means of which to even imagine justice. But as communities we can achieve anything.” 

I have the privilege to witness the resilience and courage of the community members we serve – I’ve seen women who faced extreme violation within their workplaces use their experiences to fuel their advocacy to prevent similar harm to be inflicted on their coworkers and peers. Despite being in a political moment that is fueling fear and hopelessness, I am inspired to work alongside these brave immigrant workers who continue to speak up and bring along their compañeras in the fight for safety and justice. When faced with watching the systems built to protect fail and falter, our communities re-instill hope and remind me that we keep us safe.