Mazzoni Center next week will welcome a new head of its legal department who has extensive LGBT-rights experience on both sides of the Delaware.
David Rosenblum will begin as Mazzoni’s director of legal services Aug. 29, following his role as Equal Employment Opportunity Officer in New Jersey’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development.
Rosenblum will take over for current director Amara Chaudhry, who will leave her post to become the staff attorney and civil-rights director at the local chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Chaudhry served on the Council’s board several years ago and was contacted by earlier this year once it acquired the resources to launch a legal practice, she said.
Chaudhry started as the director of Mazzoni’s legal department in 2008 when it was housed under Equality Advocates and successfully transitioned it over to Mazzoni the following year, an effort she said impressed the council.
“They thought I would be a good candidate to start up their legal department and, while in some ways I started the legal practice at Mazzoni, this would be starting something really from scratch, which I thought would be a new and different challenge,” she said.
During her tenure, Chaudhry said, she’s particularly proud of the successful resolution of such cases as that of the Penn State professor who was denied tenure after speaking out on LGBT issues, as well as the public hearings held by the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations — the first in a number of years — on the employment-discrimination complaint filed by her client, a transgender city employee.
When Chaudhry came on board she was the only staff attorney, but Mazzoni has since hired a second, Adam Williams, earlier this year and is about to bring on a third attorney, Benjamin Salvina, who will work alongside Rosenblum, with the help of a team of legal interns, on the up-to 100 active docketed cases the department handles.
Mazzoni Center executive director Nurit Shein said Rosenblum’s “considerable professional experience and commitment to the cause of equal rights” will make him an ideal fit for the agency.
Prior to his most recent post, where he oversaw employment-discrimination complaints for the department, Rosenblum served as the state’s deputy attorney general and also as a trial attorney at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
He was a founding board member of the former Center for Lesbian and Gay Rights, the predecessor to Equality Pennsylvania, and was a co-founder and co-chair of the Philadelphia Bar Association’s Committee on the Legal Rights of Lesbians and Gay Men.
Rosenblum also started a similar group, the New Jersey State Bar Association’s LGBT Committee, and co-founded and co-chaired New Jersey’s first LGBT state employee group, Proud2WorkNJ.
He has additionally served as chair of the Gay and Lesbian Lawyers of Philadelphia, which in 2000 presented him with its Michael M. Greenberg Award for “leadership, activism and advocacy.”
“I am thrilled to be joining the staff at Mazzoni Center,” Rosenblum said. “I have devoted my entire professional career to ensuring that equal-opportunity principles are integrated into all aspects of the workforce, and in my new role I look forward to continuing that pursuit and ensuring that the LGBT community has a voice in the legal system.”
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].