- Ms. Axelrod serves as Co-Chair of the NAMWOLF Advocacy Committee which advocates nationwide for the greater inclusion of minority and women owned law firms.
- She is a founder of the Fearless Women Network, a non-profit dedicated to shattering glass ceilings and obliterating unequal pay, and served as Co-Chair of its Philadelphia Symposium.
- In 2014, Ms. Axelrod was appointed by the President of the ABA to the ABA’s Task Force on Gender Equity and served as an American Bar Association Diversity Fellow.
- Ms. Axelrod is a longstanding member of the National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL) Diversity Committee and is a former member of the NAWL Amicus Committee.
- She serves on the Advisory Board of Women Owned Law (WOL) and as Co-Chair of WOL’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force. This non-profit’s mission is to provide opportunities for women legal entrepreneurs to come together, support each other and help their businesses prosper.
- She spent years serving on the Pennsylvania Bar Association (PBA) Commission on Women in the Profession (WIP) Executive Council and Diversity Team of Ambassadors. She is also a former Co-Chair of the PBA WIP Diversity Committee and remains a PBA Minority Bar Committee member.
- She is a member of the Philadelphia Bar Association Women’s Initiatives in Law Firms Task Force and in 2010, served as Co-Chair of the Philadelphia Bar Association Law Practice Management Committee. She also serves on the Philadelphia Bar Association’s Women’s Initiatives in Law Firms Task Force.
- From 2000 to 2003, while serving on the Executive Committee of the Young Lawyers Division of the Philadelphia Bar Association, Ms. Axelrod co-chaired the Michael K. Smith Oratorical Contest, organizing and running a moot court competition in which attorneys in the Philadelphia Bar Association volunteer to judge Philadelphia public school students in grades 4-8, who present mock oral appellate arguments. These Bar Reporter pages include articles about two of the contests: here and here.
- When she was President of the Temple Law Alumni Association (TLAA) from 2012-2013, she founded the TLAA Women’s Initiative and the TLAA Diversity Committee and the committees’ annual awards, the TLAA Women’s Leadership Award and the TLAA Diversity Champion Award. She also created the criteria for both awards and presented the first honorees with their awards.
- She is a member of the Forum of Executive Women, an organization of locally influential women, in which she serves on the Inclusion, Mentor, and Women in Executive Leadership and Governance Committees, and she serves on DirectWomen, an organization dedicated to advancing women lawyers onto major corporate board positions.
- Ms. Axelrod has taken formal LGBTQ ally training, twice, and served as an ally and expert in the equality, diversity, and inclusion space in the Philadelphia LGBT Exchange.
- Since 2013, Ms. Axelrod has been a member of The Barristers’ Association of Philadelphia, an organization dedicated to addressing the professional needs and development of Black lawyers in the City of Philadelphia.
- Since 2011, Ms. Axelrod has also been running holiday toy drives benefitting children living without homes in local Salvation Army shelters, on their way to getting more permanent housing.
- In college, Ms. Axelrod tutored a local African American high school student through all three years she spent on campus at Brandeis University. (She spent her junior year abroad.) Her mentee, Malik, was one of the few minorities in his school and faced discrimination from both his fellow students and teachers.
- After law school, Ms. Axelrod devoted four (4) years volunteering, after work hours and on weekends, coaching high school mock trial teams. Two of the teams Ms. Axelrod coached were the 1999 and 2000 inner-city, all-minority Overbrook High School Teams, whom Ms. Axelrod co-coached in the John S. Bradway High School National Mock Trial Competition. The 2000 Overbrook High School Mock Trial Team Ms. Axelrod coached beat over 65 public and parochial schools to make it to the Regional Championship of the competition. The 2001 Team she coached made it to the state semi-final round. While on average, one out of every three students do not graduate from Overbrook High School, every student Ms. Axelrod coached did and all but one went on to college. One of the Overbrook students Ms. Axelrod coached went on to graduate from Temple Law School and herself coached an Overbrook High School Mock Trial Team to victory in the Regional Championship of the competition. Ms. Axelrod also coached the Upper Darby and Clearview Regional High School Mock Trial Teams in 2005 and 2008, respectively.
- In 2000, during her time working as an attorney at Blank Rome, Ms. Axelrod spearheaded bringing “Philadelphia Reads” to Blank Rome’s Philadelphia Office. Through the program, overwhelmingly minority, inner-city school children are brought to companies so that adults in them can reach the program’s goal of teaching the students to read well and independently by the end of the third grade.