Using Passion to Power Change

Human rights has been a guiding force in Lindsey Clayton’s career. Clayton has a passion for social justice and last summer secured her dream job of working for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Minnesota.

Clayton is graduating this spring from the Master of Human Rights (MHR) program in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and the College of Liberal Arts, where she has self-designed a focus on advocacy and community engagement. Clayton’s experiences teaching in the Milwaukee area and rural northern Arizona originally got her interested in human rights. “In both of those situations I saw human rights violations all over the place,” she says. These experiences inspired Clayton to create change through advocacy and policy. 

During the time she was teaching at the urban high school in Milwaukee, Treyvon Martin was murdered. Realizing that this could have happened to one of Clayton’s own students, she said the news hit her like a ton of bricks. This sparked a fierce desire in Clayton to do what she could to protect her students and others from racial targeting and human rights abuses. Though she knows that teachers play a vital role in influencing students’ lives, Lindsey knew the type of change she wanted to make would need a different platform. 

Following that year, Lindsey was teaching in Arizona, when several of her middle school students had experienced the deportation of their parents. Between the devastation she saw in their faces, along with the recent murders of Philando Castile and George Floyd, this was Clayton’s last straw. Her passion for social justice was reignited and she decided to apply for the MHR program at Humphrey. 

With her interest in human rights, the MHR program offered Clayton the chance to build her professional skills with a social justice focus. Clayton took the course, Human Rights Policy: Issues and Actors, with Professor Tricia Olsen, where she had the opportunity to learn about the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for an assignment and fell in love with the work of the organization. Clayton interviewed MHR alumnus Paul Sullivan (MHR ‘22), who now works as an organizer for the ACLU of Minnesota. She kept in contact with Sullivan and continued to ask about internship and employment opportunities. Her dedication to social justice and her enthusiasm for the organization led to Sullivan and the ACLU creating an internship position for Clayton. 

The ACLU of Minnesota works to protect the civil liberties and rights and raise awareness of different civil rights issues through litigation, lobbying, and engaging with communities in Minnesota. As the Policy and Engagement Intern at the ACLU-MN, Clayton conducted research on different legislators, office holders, and their voting behaviors on relevant bills. Through her work, she developed guides for volunteers that helped them inform people convicted of felonies about their voting rights and candidates who aligned with their beliefs for the campaign, “Reclaim the Vote: Voting with a Felony Conviction.”

Clayton’s Dream Come True

Clayton’s favorite part about the internship was helping the Reclaim the Vote campaign volunteers, getting to see them in training, and the impact she was able to have on the volunteers by providing them with information and resources to make change. “Going into a place like this motivates you because they are working tirelessly to stand up for everyone in the country right now,” she says. “They provide hope when it is desperately needed.” Working for the ACLU was Clayton’s dream and the experience connected her to work she felt passionate about and for an organization she continues to admire. 

Interning for the ACLU has also expanded Clayton’s awareness and helped her understand the breadth of human rights violations all around the world. “It just opened my eyes to really just how many human rights violations are going on right now that we just don’t know about as an average citizen,” she says. “It made me realize how needed human rights workers are.”

Human rights today can feel like a tough field to work in, but the environment that Clayton worked in at the ACLU ignited her passion and drive to stand up for everyone’s rights. Clayton’s internship showed her the importance of human rights work, and her passion for human rights issues will continue to guide her career. “Human rights is difficult, it can feel like a losing battle a lot of the time,” Clayton says. “But that doesn’t mean it is not worth the fight."

“Human rights at the expense of others’ human rights is not human rights”

Working at the ACLU confirmed to Clayton that defending civil rights and liberties, and working to defend human rights, is where she belongs and what she wants to do. “It really just reaffirmed that I am meant to work in this space and that I want to work in the human rights space,” she says. 

Clayton defines human rights as something that either all of us have or none of us have. This reaffirms the importance of human rights workers and why it is vital to support them and the rights of others. “Human rights to me is that every person on this planet can live with dignity and not only have the basic needs, but can thrive in their own way,” Clayton says. “I think that if a certain group of people do not have human rights, then none of us do. Human rights at the expense of others’ human rights is not human rights.”

Though she is open to many areas of work under the broad field of human rights, Clayton knows that she wants to stay involved with the ACLU and their work, and plans to contribute however she can.