Confronting Corporate Abuse, Protecting the Public: Q&A with Chisolm Allenlundy

Chisolm Allenlundy’s approach to public service was shaped long before he became an assistant attorney general in New York prosecuting corporate fraud and abuse. It began when he helped build a Roosevelt Network chapter at the University of Alabama and was deepened through years of legal aid work with tenants facing eviction, debt collection, and foreclosure.

Across each role, Allenlundy has seen how seemingly ordinary policy and personnel decisions can profoundly impact people’s everyday lives. Today, he believes—and knows from experience—that the best public servants are those who never lose sight of the people their work affects.

This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and length.

Finding Roosevelt

I got involved when I was a freshman at the University of Alabama. I had no idea what Roosevelt was when someone approached me about helping start the first chapter on campus.

We wanted to inject some fresh progressive ideas into the campus environment. We felt that kind of progressive space wasn’t being well-represented in the campus discourse, especially given that we were at a university in the South with plenty of conservative voices.

I got involved without really knowing what I was getting into, but throughout college I stayed involved. I served in leadership roles on campus and across the national organization, worked on Roosevelt’s financialization of higher education project, and joined the Roosevelt Network’s student board of advisors.

I stayed involved after graduating because Roosevelt had become a home for me—not just politically, but professionally and personally. The people I met through Roosevelt kept me grounded in the kind of work I wanted to do.

On the Work

For me, pursuing a public service career has always been first and foremost about harmonizing my personal values with my day job as much as possible. I never felt comfortable with the idea that you’re one person at work and another person outside of work.

Roosevelt helped me recognize that there is a career path that allows you to bring those values into both your personal and professional life. You don’t have to say, “I need to take a job that pays the bills, and my personal beliefs are just going to have to take a back seat.” There is an entire ecosystem of people waking up every day and fighting for a political and economic system that works for everybody.

I’m not sure I would have recognized that was a real possibility without an organization like Roosevelt to keep me grounded and remind me that there are opportunities out there where you can bring your values into your professional work.

I didn’t graduate from law school thinking I would be doing consumer protection and corporate accountability work in a state attorney general’s office. At the time, I was more focused on the intersection of poverty and the criminal justice system.

After law school, I worked in legal aid in Alabama doing housing eviction defense and debt collection work. In that role, I saw how regularly poor and working-class people were marginalized and penalized, not just by the criminal justice system but by the private companies that sought to extract wealth from them by overcharging them on rent, loading them with junk fees, or evicting them at the first opportunity.

And every week, I watched families lose nearly everything because they couldn’t afford rent or because they didn’t have the means to defend themselves in court.

These were not one-off occurrences or tragic accidents. They were part of the system—baked into the assembly line we’ve created in most jurisdictions governing our housing and eviction law.

I came to see how much power corporations had over people’s lives. For many large corporate landlords, the people they were affecting weren’t real families with real stories, they were lines on a spreadsheet.

I wanted to get at what I felt was the root of the problem: corporate abuse and outsized corporate influence over people’s day-to-day lives.

There has always been this attack line against government that we pay taxes and then the government spends that money on things nobody needs. But what we’ve seen, particularly since this administration has been in office, is that when we take away important government bodies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we actually see how much those agencies were doing.

These agencies were taking the resources that funded them and multiplying the payout to consumers by addressing corporate fraud, deception, and abuse. They very much pay for themselves and then some, because without a corporate cop on the beat, there is nobody preventing a company from harming consumers or holding them accountable when they break the law.

We need government agencies that can protect consumers and make sure that when people are harmed, they get every dollar back that they are owed. That’s what I try to do in my work at the state attorney general’s office: make sure that, to the extent we can, we are holding companies accountable for breaking the law and violating consumers’ rights. That’s why we exist.

On the People

Elizabeth Warren’s old line that “personnel is policy” really hits the nail on the head. We can have the perfect laws or policies, but at the end of the day, it’s the individuals enforcing those laws, operationalizing them, and interpreting them who actually make those laws mean something.

It’s critical not only to have the right people in those positions, but to make sure those people are close to the people those laws are designed to protect. The government can’t just be a bunch of people in an ivory tower making decisions divorced from the real day-to-day experiences of the people affected by them.

The people implementing these laws have to stay connected to the real people they’re working for.

On the Future

One thing I learned from Roosevelt and from other mentors is how critical it is, both to your personal and professional development, to get as close as you can to as many different kinds of human experiences as possible.

The most enriching part of every job I’ve had has been getting to hear directly from the people I was working for. When you actually talk to people and see the ways law, policy, and our economy affect people’s day-to-day lives, you can’t help but see who those systems protect and who they hurt.

I would encourage people to seek out those opportunities because they’re often not presented as the flashiest or most prestigious. Be open-minded about how your career progresses and surround yourself with people who keep you grounded in why you wanted to do this work in the first place. A community like Roosevelt reminds you why you do this work and that it doesn’t have to be a tradeoff.

It’s easy to become disillusioned in a world that feels increasingly fraught and without clear answers about how to right the ship.

But I think it’s much harder to be disillusioned when you actually get to know people whose lives depend on getting it right. You can’t help but be angered when you see how these systems fail people, but you’re also inspired by the people who persevere anyway.

Bryan Stevenson talks about getting proximate to the people harmed by the systems we want to change, and I couldn’t agree more. I wouldn’t be the person or attorney I am without the people I’ve met throughout my career who shared their stories with me and helped me understand the tangible reality of the decisions we make at a political and economic level.