MEET YOUR NEIGHBOR · AMITYVILLE

Most people pick one graduate degree. Jeanine Guelee of Amityville is doing two at once — a law degree at Touro Law Center and a master’s in social work at Stony Brook University.

Those two paths usually lead to different rooms. A lawyer argues the case; a social worker sits with the family. Guelee appears to be after the overlap, and the internship she just landed sits exactly in it.

She has been placed for the academic year with ERASE Racism, the Long Island civil rights organization based in Syosset. Her placement satisfies a requirement of the social work program, which is a mundane detail with a non-mundane consequence: the requirement sent a Copiague High School graduate back onto Long Island’s own civil rights problem rather than off the Island entirely.

Guelee graduated from Walter G. O’Connell Copiague High School and then from Stony Brook.

ERASE Racism works on structural racism, with public education and housing as its two main fronts — the two systems that decide, on Long Island more than almost anywhere, what a child’s zip code is worth. It does that through research, policy advocacy, legal action, and community education, and it works in Long Island, New York State and national coalitions.

Guelee’s year will run across two of its programs: the Education Equity Initiative, which includes the Student Task Force and the Long Island Leaders of Tomorrow Conferences, and the Inclusive Housing Program.

Elaine Gross, the organization’s founder and president emerita, said ERASE Racism is “excited to welcome Jeanine Guelee to ERASE Racism as a graduate student intern,” and that Guelee “knows Long Island and its civil rights challenges well” — the perspective, Gross said, of a graduate student who was raised here.

That last part is the reason this is a Meet Your Neighbor and not a press release. Long Island exports its ambitious graduates. The ones who stay and work on the thing they grew up inside are rarer, and they are the ones whose names are worth knowing early.

We have asked to speak with her. If she says yes, you will hear from her directly rather than about her.

Sources: Patch · ERASE Racism · Touro Law Center