Politics
A Student’s Wisdom Helped This Teacher Win $200,000
Diana Imbert-Hodges, who runs Defying Legal Gravity, is one of the winners of the David Prize. She credited a student for inspiring her to start the organization.
Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll find out what someone who is splitting a $1 million prize plans to do with the money. We’ll also get details on a House subcommittee report about how Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his administration tallied nursing home deaths early in the coronavirus pandemic.
Diana Imbert-HodgesCredit…Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet
Sometimes it’s the students who teach the teachers.
That is the short version of Diana Imbert-Hodges’s story. It’s a story that now includes winning a $200,000 prize that stemmed from what she learned from that student: She started a nonprofit called Defying Legal Gravity to teach high school students from low-income households about the legal system.
The brainstorm that led to Defying Legal Gravity came when she was teaching a Saturday program for seventh-graders in Harlem. She was also falling behind in her own classes as a first-year student at the Fordham University School of Law. Now she is one of the recipients of this year’s David Prize, a no-strings-attached award that recognizes people in New York who have “big ideas to make it even better.” It was named for the real estate developer David Walentas and set up by his son Jed.
One of her students in Harlem had been complaining that a deli near her public-housing apartment on the Upper West Side always served her a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich when she had ordered “fake bacon,” made from turkey, not pork, in keeping with her Muslim background.
“One day she ran in and said she was able to get the right order,” Imbert-Hodges recalled. “I said, ‘You finally told him he was messing up your order?’ She said, ‘No, it was contract law.’ I said, ‘What?’
