Staff Attorney

Email: [email protected]

Jahnavi Jagannath (she/they) is an artist, musician, and bug enthusiast from Memphis, TN who serves as Empower DC's staff attorney. She became passionate about place-based Environmental Justice work while attending Rice University in Houston, TX during Hurricane Harvey, witnessing the disproportionate lack of care for low-income folks of color living in neighborhoods near gulf petrochemical plants. She moved to DC in 2018, finding home in DC's abolitionist organizing spaces and picnics in Malcolm X park, and working in criminal legal policy research. 

They then went to NYU Law and graduated in 2024. In law school, Jahnavi was a Root Tilden Kern scholar for public interest law. They spent summers first as a legal intern for Texas Fair Defense Project, doing civil legal services for low-income and incarcerated Texans; and next as a fellow at the Alameda County Public Defender's Office felony division, where they argued cases and got felony charges dropped. After taking the bar, they did eviction defense and tenant organizing as a Pro Bono Scholar at Takeroot Justice, a New York City legal service provider. She also made art for NYU's abolitionist student groups and organized with Artists Against Pipelines, an environmental justice art collective in New York. She moved back to DC in 2025 and is grateful to be back.

Jahnavi believes strongly in the interconnectedness of all facets of our lives, including safe and high-quality housing, public safety without funding policing and prisons, a global system without genocides and extractive capitalism, and healthy built environments with green space and biodiversity. She believes that when people and communities are cared for and resourced, they will care for others -- and that the world we want to live in is within our reach.