Alyssa Kennedy, LAW ’24, is a 2022 Law & Public Scholar and Rubin-Presser Social Justice Fellow at Temple University Beasley School of Law. Alyssa is involved in the Community Service Committee of the Student Public Interest Network, a volunteer with Temple’s Name Change Project, a member of If/When/How: Lawyering Justice Clinic and the National Lawyers Guild, and co-founder of Temple’s Housing Justice Initiative.
Alyssa graduated magna cum laude as a Benjamin Franklin Scholar from the University of Pennsylvania in December 2016 with a B.A. in Health & Societies with a concentration in Health Policy & Law and double minor in Economic Policy and American Public Policy. In January 2017, Alyssa submatriculated into Penn’s Pearlman School of Medicine’s Master of Public Health (MPH) program.
While pursuing her MPH, Alyssa worked at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in the Infectious Disease Department managing the HIV Outpatient and Ryan White Program. In this position, she administered and assured compliance with the federal Ryan White Program, including quality improvement and access assessments. Alyssa also developed solutions to improve patient and clinical staff education and provided trainings to support optimal outcomes in light of patients’ care coverage and support systems. Additionally, she advocated for changes to treatment algorithms to include considerations of patient’s social and economic factors.
Alyssa continues to engage with the Philadelphia community through extensive volunteer work with public health-oriented non-profit and mutual aid organizations. Through these experiences, Alyssa learned about the failures of existing social and legislative policies. These are not theoretical or academic learnings, but tangible, often stark realizations about the desperate need for focused and informed public and private solutions necessary to achieve health equity and restorative justice. As a Law & Public Policy Scholar, Alyssa is working as a legal intern at the Department of Health & Human Services in the Office of General Counsel. Upon graduating from Temple, she is excited to apply her new legal skills championing and advocating for equitable public health policy