Sara Cullinane, Esq.

Sara served as founding director of Make the Road New Jersey (MRNJ) and state director of Make the Road Action New Jersey from 2014-2025. Founded in late 2014, MRNJ is a multi-issue, membership-based organization that builds the power of immigrant and working-class communities of color to achieve respect and dignity through community organizing, the provision of legal and support services, policy innovation, and transformative education.

MRNJ’s community centers in Elizabeth, Passaic, and Perth Amboy provide legal representation, health, education, and youth development services to tens of thousands of families each year. MRNJ has won more than twenty campaigns that have impacted one million immigrant and working-class New Jerseyans, including driver licenses and occupational licenses for undocumented immigrants, a $15 minimum wage, local rent control ordinances, the strongest anti-wage theft and temp worker protections in the country, and the nation’s first guaranteed severance law.  MRNJ also led the campaign to stop a massive Amazon Air Hub at the Newark Airport and to win a $110 million investment in cash assistance for excluded workers during the pandemic. Previously, Sara was a staff attorney and Equal Justice Works fellow at Make the Road New York and worked as a community health advocate and union organizer. She taught at the New York University Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and holds a JD from NYU School of Law, where she was a Root-Tilden-Kern public service scholar.