The Path To Nonprofit Leadership: A Compilation Episode
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Show Notes
In this special episode of The Portia Project podcast, we shine a light on the journeys of our nonprofit leader guests and how they transitioned from law school to nonprofit leadership roles.
This episode is powered by Trellis.
Transcript
Welcome to a special episode of the show, highlighting our nonprofit leader guests and their paths to nonprofit leadership from law school. We hope you find inspiration in their journeys.
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Jessie Kornberg - Skirball Cultural Center
Jessie Kornberg, President and CEO of the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.
I started volunteering for Bet Tzedek when I was in law school. I continued to volunteer for Bet Tzedek when I was at the firm. I would always buy a table and I’d be so proud that we were sitting at a fancy firm table. I was a huge fan of the work. One of my closest colleagues at Bird Marella, the person who recruited me to the firm, a partner there named Mitch Kamin, had previously led Bet Tzedek. I am such a huge fan of his. Talk about a mentor.
I remember sitting at the gala dinner at my fancy Bird Marella table, and they honored all the past presidents, including Mitch. There are these seven guys on the stage. These are legendary lawyers. There was Terry Friedman. Forget a legendary lawyer. He’s a legendary leader. There was Stan Levy and Mike Feuer who is a city attorney. These are huge reputations. They’re all on stage together. I’m looking at them all.
Sandy Samuels who was the president at the time who’d previously been general counsel of a publicly traded company was also there. These are huge figures. I thought, “These are such amazing guys. When Sandy retires and Bet Tzedek is hiring someone new, I’m going to make sure some kick-ass woman applies for this job or I’m going to apply for this job.” It was one week later that Sandy announced he was leaving. I was like, “No.”
You were like, “I might have to do it. I might have to apply.”
I didn’t feel ready. I didn’t feel qualified, not merely, but I also couldn’t stop thinking about it. I ultimately realized that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep at night if I didn’t give it a shot. My first conversation was with Mitch. He took some convincing. The first time he and I talked about it, he was like, “What?” I was a baby lawyer to him and this was something he had done not that long ago. He was like, “What?” I made a case and said, “I’ve got some nonprofit experience. I’ve done some of this, but not at this scale.” He said, “Okay.”
He shepherded me and helped me think about how to apply, how to talk to other people about it, and how to talk to people at Bird Marella. I was going to be a stronger applicant with their support, but it’s hard to talk to your current employer about the fact that you’re looking for another job. He guided me through the whole thing. That still didn’t mean I thought I was going to get the job. I was very happy at Bet Tzedek. I had plenty left to do there.
When Skirball approached me about succeeding their founder, Dr. Uri Herscher, upon his retirement after 40 years of leadership, I was a little like, “You want me to do what?” I was a little incredulous. Over time and several conversations, the first was I did end up feeling that Bet Tzedek might be the best thing I ever did with my law degree. I loved so much what the organization was doing, so it didn’t seem like my next job would be to return to law firm practice or to return to a different legal job.
I was 34. I wasn’t probably going to stay at Bet Tzedek for another 30 years. That wouldn’t have been good for me, and it wouldn’t have been good for Bet Tzedek. Here was someone offering me an opportunity to learn about a whole new field of arts and culture. It’s a very interesting, complicated facility to manage. We have eighteen acres on top of the Santa Monica Mountains in the middle of a Fire Canyon. I was going to learn all about that. First, it was very opportunistic like, “This is amazing to get an opportunity to learn.”
Ultimately, what I came to feel and say to the board at Skirball is that the work that Bet Tzedek is doing is essential and urgent. It’s not enough that there are too many days where the solutions offered in the courtroom are insufficient to the problems that we face.” That’s why we see the same cases over and over again.
The solution is not just a policy solution either. Too many times, we have a bad policy, a bad law, or a bad outcome in litigation because the entire system lacks humanity because all of the participants in the system have failed to understand the shared humanity that is in effect. The Skirball stands to be a place that could improve that.
All too often, bad policies, laws, and litigation outcomes stem from a lack of humanity in the system. This is because participants fail to recognize our shared humanity.
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Jennifer Friend - Project Hope Alliance
Jennifer Friend, CEO of Project Hope Alliance.
I remember very distinctly when I decided that I was going to go to law school. There were a couple of things that factored into it. One was my dad's comment that I needed a job that paid by the word. He said that in a moment of frustration because I was arguing with him about something. The other was because, at the time, I was in seventh grade and my family of six was living in a motel in Anaheim. We were all in this one motel room. We had been evicted. That was the beginning of the season of my family experiencing homelessness.
I remember sitting there in the room. I had made the school play, but I couldn't go and be in the school play because my family only had enough gas money to go from Anaheim to Huntington Beach and Huntington Beach back once a day. There wasn't enough money for me to go to the rehearsals and practices that were required on the weekend. I sat there and thought to myself, “I need a job where I can make enough money regardless of who my partner is, have children, buy a house, put my kids through college, and not have to worry about financial insecurity.” I thought, “I'll be a lawyer.” That sounds a bit cliché, but that was it.
I had always been very intrigued by politics even from a young age and the argumentative style. That little freckled girl in the Tropic Motel in seventh grade decided that being the social butterfly, verbose, and wanting to have financial security equaled law school and being a lawyer. I learned a lot in the process as a grownup.
I went to Whittier Law School. I passed the bar on the first try. I already had a job at a small civil litigation firm. I got this letter in the mail that said, “We are questioning the moral character portion of your bar application.” I've lived my life as a Pollyanna. There was nothing scandalous or remotely scandalous about my moral character or my background. It turned out that the reason it was being questioned was that I had so many evictions on my credit.
If you’re eighteen years old and your parents were the lessors or the lessees, they had their names on the lease and they would be served with eviction notices. If they said, “Our daughter who's eighteen is living in the home and she hasn't been served,” it restarted the eviction process. Every time my parents would get eviction papers, they would give notice that I hadn’t been served.
I had eight evictions on my credit even though I was only 24 years old. I had to have my dad sign an affidavit under penalty of perjury. I had judges writing me letters of recommendation. I had to rally all that stuff. It delayed my being sworn into the bar by six months, which is something that we don't think about. A lot of our first-gen students who are coming through and overcoming these obstacles and barriers get to their dreams. Even still, as a result of things that are outside of their control, so to speak, it delays their dreams even further.
Finally, I was reviewed, and then they said, “You're fine.” I was admitted. I practiced at a small firm and then went to a more mid-sized firm, and then popped. I had a dream to make a partner before I was 40. I ultimately, at Selman Breitman, found a firm where I had tremendous respect for the managing partner of the Orange County Office.
Jerry Popovich, without question, is one of the best civil defense lawyers in America. It was his character and dedication to his family, as well as the pursuit of excellence in the law and leadership in the law that I was like, “This is where I want to be.” I made a partner at 38 and then had my second kid pretty much right away because I was like, “Now, I can do it.” I had the first baby and still managed to be made partner, but I knew I was rolling the dice if I tried to have two babies before a partner. That wasn't going to happen, not as a litigator anyway.
I loved practicing law. I specialized in Fourteenth Amendment Due Process department matters, so I represented a lot of public contract workers. I was at the forefront, securing due process rights for construction contractors in public bidding, and having the ability to engage in the practice of discovery before being blacklisted. That was fun. I also did catastrophic injury and general defense work as well.
I always loved being a lawyer. I argued in the Court of Appeal at least ten times if not more. I didn't leave the law. I went to my calling. That was a little bit bittersweet. Being in a trial is unlike anything else. You become completely obsessed with your case and the facts. It’s like being an ER doctor. You’re all in and can't see anything else going on around you. I did that for thirteen years.
One of my brothers had watched The Motel Kids of Orange County documentary. That is about the origin of Project Hope. I watched the documentary. My brother and I went to a board meeting to find out what it was. At the time, the organization's total operating budget was probably $20,000. It served more as a foundation. It funded bringing kids from motels and shelters to this one public school. I walked into the board meeting and walked out as the secretary of the board, a good Type-A overachiever thing.
I started getting involved with the board. At the time, Hayes Drumwright who founded Trace3 was the chair of the board. We started talking about, “What would it look like to do something transformational in the lives of these kids?” I shared my story with the board, but I wasn't ready to take it public. It would be frustrating to me when I tried to talk about what childhood homelessness looks like in Orange County. I would throw stats out there like, “There are over 20,000 students experiencing homelessness that are identified in Orange County's public school system.”
They didn't get it because we think only of the person at the end of the freeway holding the sign asking for money. We think of middle-aged unhoused individuals who are sleeping on the sidewalk. We don't think of kids sleeping in motels, shelters, and cars. The trial lawyer in me was like, “What kind of demonstrative exhibit can I create that will convey the story I'm trying to tell?”
I was in New York visiting a client and I had time for the airport, so I went to MoMA. I saw this multimedia art installation piece that you could walk through. I thought, “I'm going to build one of the motel rooms that my family lived in. What if we did that and then people could walk through it?” I cold-called the dean of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at UCI and said, “Joe, you don't know me, but will you do this for me? Will you build a multimedia art installation piece?” He said, “Yes.” He has been on our board for eleven years. They built a set so we could take it apart and take it on tour.
I pitched the story to the Orange County Register and said, “I'd like to tell a story about the intersectionality of a nonprofit having a story it needed to tell, a university having the skillset to tell that story, and private enterprise having the cash to pay to have the story told.” My brothers had donated $10,000 to pay for the materials. The register said, “That's a really interesting story. That's great. We'll send a reporter out and do a story the day that you debut the art piece.”
At the same time, we were looking for a new CEO. We were serving 65 kids, our total operating budget was maybe $80,000, and we had one employee, but we wanted to do something meaningful. We hired a search firm. I was chairing the search committee. People on the search committee said, “We want to give the elephant in the room some air. We want you to be the CEO.”
I laughed. I said, “I know how much the job pays. I cannot do this job. It's not a possibility. Even though I would love to, I can't do it.” Simultaneously, I'm at church. I'm hearing all these sermons about Esther. She’s the queen, but she’s Jewish, so she can live and exist within two otherwise separate and different communities. I was then thinking, “I’m a partner at a law firm but I experienced homelessness.” I was starting to feel all of these.
I showed up for the interview with a reporter. The reporter and I are sitting on the bed in the art installation. The reporter says, “This feels incredibly personal to me. I'm looking around and there are football trophies and personal objects that convey lived experience. How in the world did you come up with this?” I said, “Off the record, I lived here for nine months with my family of six.” He was like, “That is the story. Are you ready to tell it?”
I was suited up because I felt so insecure that day knowing that I was walking into what I had internalized as a very shameful childhood. I had my best Hermes scarf and Brooks Brothers suit on. I shined my shoes. I looked at him and said, “I'm not ready to tell it, but God is, so I’ll go for it.” For the first time, I told the story and ended up on the front page of The Register.
I was terrified. I was 42. I thought, “The gig is up. Everyone is going to know that I'm an imposter. It's all over. I managed to fake it this long. I had built all my clients. I had made a partner. It's done. It was a good ride and run.” I got on the phone. I'm calling my clients at Dish Network and my partners to let them know, “I’m going to be in the newspaper. I don't know if this is going to affect my business.” I was afraid people were going to not want me to represent them. In my head, I've created this false narrative. Instead, there was an outpouring of love and support. They were like, “That's why we hired you. We didn't know what it was inside you that always drove you to do more, but that's it.”
After this one sermon, I was supposed to quit my job and be the CEO. I'm sitting there thinking, “This is terrifying.” Even down to the clothes that I wore, I had built an external armor and a professional armor that I thought kept me worthy. Doing this, I was going to have to dismantle all of those things and ultimately just be me. I didn't know what that meant. One thing about being a lawyer is it's an identity. It's not a job.
Being a lawyer is more than just a job; it's an identity.
I went home and said to my husband, “God wants me to quit my job and be the CEO of Project Hope.” He was like, “We can't do that.” I said, “I'm terrified of being actively disobedient to what I know in my soul I'm supposed to be doing. I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I'm more scared of that than not having enough money.” He was like, “You know what our mortgage is.”
He came back a couple of weeks later and said, “I ran the numbers. We have enough credit that we could live on credit for a year. I don't know what this is going to look like.” He sold high-end real estate, and this was the same time the market crashed. That was nine years ago. Last year, we grew by over 451%. We served over 3,500 kids. We are serving kids at 43 campuses throughout Orange County with social workers on-site full-time from kindergarten through age 24, kids who are experiencing homelessness. It’s the best decision I have ever made.
I vividly remember sitting in that multipurpose room at Skyview Elementary, which was that school, taking two hours for me to print out a letter on letterhead. I’m crying, thinking, “I'm the most incompetent person. I have no idea what I'm doing. I did not go to school to be a nonprofit executive. I can't even print a letter on a letterhead. I have no secretary. There's me and La Shawn Hye sitting in this multipurpose room. I'm supposed to be figuring out how to end generational homelessness. This vision I cast as a board chair, now I'm supposed to execute this?”
Being a lawyer is about telling a story that you believe in, hoping that other people will believe in it too so you can get a just result. That's what I do every day. I know for a fact that for our kids experiencing homelessness, anything is possible for them if we fill in those gaps and eliminate the barriers that homelessness is causing. I want everyone else to know and believe that too. When we do that, we see our kids do the impossible.
As a trial lawyer, you have to become a short-term expert on disparate subjects. You have to absorb all this information. You have to discern reliable sources and what are not, what are common threads, and what are common themes. That's what I had to do. I still do that. I had to read everything that I could find on generational homelessness, poverty, and how communities of color are disparately impacted by different systems. I then had to try to find commonalities, problem-solve, and hope that I'm articulating it enough that other people share or at least see the passion and possibility in it.
All the time, I even still think now“I need a different degree.” I was going to go back to school. I'm like, “Maybe I need my MBA,” because I was doing all the financial forecasting. I remember that I would figure out my quarterly revenue goals. I'd look at my clients, my caseload, my associates, and billable hours, and figure out how much revenue I needed and be like, “It’s the same thing.” This is where I'm supposed to be. I loved the practice of law. I did not leave it. I miss the courtroom, but all day long, I'll take our kids as my life client.
Our case managers have their own office on the public school campuses, K to 12th grade. We're there when the kids are in school. Teachers, janitorial workers, and school counselors will identify that a kid is experiencing something. When they think it might be related to their housing status, they refer them to our office. We do an intake. There is no branding in our office that says that it has anything to do with homelessness, so kids don't even necessarily know that we only serve students experiencing homelessness.
We built out what's called the Hope Index, which has eleven different indices across which we measure our intervention. It could be anything from basic needs. We have food pantries, hygiene pantries, clothing, and those types of things on campus and in our space. Sometimes, a student will come in because they have slept in a car. They need to brush their teeth, change their clothes, and those types of things.
Oftentimes, it is through our partnerships with UCI and their school of education. We're partnering with highly skilled tutors to catch our kids up academically, filling out FAFSA forms, or taking them to a college campus. We sent a kid and his mom to a kicker camp. He has been identified as one of the best kickers in Orange County. He was recruited to participate in this camp, believing that then he's going to start being scouted next year for a full-ride scholarship to college. We paid for the airfare, motel, camp, shoes, and all of those things. We are eliminating those barriers and filling in the gaps that homelessness causes.
When they end up graduating high school, we’re staying with them until they're 24 to help facilitate them getting permanently housed and getting into either a junior college, a four-year college, or specialized skill training so they have the ability to be financially independent adults by age 24. That's when we can say that we've ended the cycle of homelessness. It’s a 30:1 ratio, 30 kids to 1 case manager because the work is deep and intentional.
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Jessica Hubbard - Casa Youth Shelter
Jessica Hubbard, former Chief Program Officer of Girls Inc. Orange County, is now CEO of Casa Youth Shelter.
I'm often asked, “Law school, where did that come from?” The short version would be that I was teaching. I was a middle school language arts teacher and had been teaching for about eight years. I read To Kill a Mockingbird one too many times with my students, which is factual. It's one of my favorite books. We would read it every year with my students. That's part of it.
The other part is that part of the work as a teacher is inspiring the youth that you're working with. I found myself telling my kiddos, "You can be anything you want to be. Go chase those dreams. No dream is too big." I was feeling like a little bit of a hypocrite because a dream that I had way back when was to pursue and go to law school. I was not quite sure what I was going to do with it, but I felt like I would figure it out once I was there. I can remember the exact student that I was looking at and telling her that she should pursue law school. This is a sixth-grader that she could be. I was telling her that she could be an attorney someday. I took a step back and realized that I needed to give myself that opportunity as well.
Your work as a teacher is to inspire the youth you're working with.
There's also the desire I had to help and support youth in another way that I felt the limits of my impact as a teacher. Year after year, I lost so many students to the criminal justice system, to unplanned or unexpected teenage pregnancy, and a whole host of issues, like drug and alcohol use and abuse. I felt like I needed to do a bit more and was hoping that a law degree kid could assist in providing me with another way to provide a deeper impact on youth.
About halfway through my law school journey, I started to develop an inkling that I was not going to practice. I wasn't quite sure, but I was already missing that direct connection to youth. Having done well in law school, I was able to have access to incredible internships. As a dean's fellow, you have your pick of whatever internship you want. I'm so fortunate that I had incredible mentors.
I was able to dabble each summer in each school year in three different internships that piqued my interest that I thought might be the area of law that I would practice. Those were appellate laws, in which I was vice president of the moot court team and got a charge from that scene and setting, special education law, which was connected to my background in teaching, and then public defense. I was able to work at the Orange County Public Defender's Office where I had the most phenomenal mentors and female mentors there. What a great group of women, attorneys, and judges.
Having gone through those different internships, which were all amazing, I still didn't feel that click the way I did when I was a teacher and when I was working with youth. I figured, “This is the best of the best. You've got the best mentors and the areas of law that you had idealized and imagined fitting in. If that didn't seem like it was the right click, maybe this isn't my space. There's something else out there.” You can also get a sense of shame like, "I spent a lot of money on this education. I need to do something good with it.”
I wouldn't fault my law school for this, but it's part of the legal education, this focus on getting employed as an attorney following law school. You're saying, "There's so much you can do with this degree in other fields and other areas of work." I then started imagining, “What else can I do with this? How could I use it in higher education?” I then saw nonprofit work.
I saw the job opening for Girls Inc. of Orange County. At the time, it was a director of programs position. That made a lot of sense. I got very excited about that possibility and used my knowledge of education in schools in an informal education setting. It was a departure from formal education in a different setting but still an opportunity to use and utilize my legal skills. Contract negotiation, analysis, and all of those pieces could come into play, and they have.
Once I began exploring and looking into Girls Inc., I was like, "This is it." What's so cool is with this organization, we're a unique organization. We do serve youth and provide programs, education, opportunities, and resources, but a large part of our work is in advocacy, which is heavily connected to legal work as well. Working to inspire and educate the next phase of girls who can be activists and raising and uplifting their voices toward making a change in their community is where it's at for me.
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Jennafer Dorfman Wagner and Erin Smith - Family Violence Appellate Project
Jennafer Wagner and Erin Smith, Director of Programs at Family Violence Appellate Project and former Executive Director of Family Violence Appellate Project.
I recall growing up and coming through secondary school or high school feeling not very empowered as a girl, having experiences like abuse that people that I knew were going through. There was an incident when I was in History class and asked a question. After class, one of my male classmates mocked me, laughed at me, and made fun of my question. Even coming back to things like that, I knew I was smart and knew I had good, strong opinions and a strong voice, but I didn’t feel like they were valued. I felt a sense of disempowerment.
Going through college, I started to see a lot of domestic violence firsthand. One of my college roommate’s boyfriends committed abuse against her right in front of me in our college dorm room. He pushed her across the room and slammed her into the wall. Her head hit the wall. I had screamed at him to get out. This was in my home which, at that time, was my dorm room.
A later college roommate I had, her mother was a survivor of abuse at the hands of her father. I was also seeing sexual assault on campus in college firsthand. There were a lot of formative experiences before I decided to go to law school where I formed a very deep passion for the rights of women and girls to be empowered, not be abused, have a voice, and be able to be strong.
Women and girls need to be empowered, to have a voice, and to be strong, free from abuse.
After college, I started thinking about law school as, “Maybe that could be a career path or a venue, a courtroom, where there's a little more of a level playing field. People would be quiet and listen to what I'm saying for its content and because I'm making good points, not because I'm a girl or a woman.” That was my hope.
As I was thinking of going to law school, I decided to be a paralegal first and check out the illegal environment. That did solidify my belief that it would be a good career path for me. At the same time, I still experienced sexual harassment there. I had a named partner at a law firm. As a paralegal, I was probably 22 at the time. He looked me up and down, head to toe, and said, “I could see how someone could be into you.” This is in the 2000s. I knew that I wanted to go to law school. I had this deep passion for fighting for the empowerment of women and girls.
It was a long journey over many years and somewhat accidental. I have a very clear and deep passion for fighting for women and girls against abuse, but it would be too far to say I knew going into law school that I was going to commit my career to that or I was going to fund an organization. That was the farthest thing on my mind.
Coming out of law school, I clerked for a federal judge where we did domestic violence or family law whatsoever, some civil rights, and a lot of patent work. It was nothing related to what I'm doing now. I then went into private practice. I didn't know yet. Coming out of law school, you have some debt, and you try to figure out the landscape of the profession and what the different routes are. Unfortunately, coming out of law school, no matter how much the law schools or their career offices try to show you, you can never get a sense of what all the options are.
There tends to be a lot of focus on private practice and law firms. They offer great training and mentorship. I had a wonderful experience at the first law firm I went to. I did realize over time that it wasn’t my passion. I had this passion to work with women and girls. I did pro bono work there for a survivor of domestic violence who was incarcerated for 27 years and was able to get her out of prison. I wanted to do it more.
I also thought I wanted to be in trial court more than I was, so I made a shift to another type of private practice to a small firm doing family law. I thought that would give me the opportunity to be in trial court more, which was true because I was in court all the time, and also did some domestic violence work. That was true as well. That was a great experience, learning this area of law, which I’m practicing, but I still had that nagging sense of, “I know what my passion is and this isn’t it.” I wanted to do it full-time, so I was searching at that point. I was still working at this firm. I didn’t know what was next, but I knew it wasn’t this forever.
I had fortunately stayed in touch with Nancy Lemon who’s a professor of Domestic Violence Law at UC Berkeley where I went to law school. I had stayed in touch with Nancy over the years. She knew I was a little unhappy with where I was and wanted to do something else and that I was incredibly passionate about domestic violence law. I was in the right place at the right time.
To come back to your original question, Nancy called me and I answered the phone. She said, “Do you want to come over to Berkeley and hear about this idea that two of my current law students have to start a new domestic violence organization?” I said, “Sure.” We had breakfast over in Berkeley on a Sunday. I heard from these two incredibly passionate 2Ls at UC Berkeley at the time this idea that they had to start an organization specifically focused on the appellate level for domestic violence survivors.
Instantly, I knew from my experience being a trial practitioner in family law and domestic violence for the past few years, as well as the years of pro bono and going all the way back to working with Nancy in law school that that was a need. There are legal aid organizations around the state that do trial-level work and represent survivors of abuse for free, which is not even close to enough, but they're there, that there was no one at the appellate level.
In 2011 and 2012, you had two excellent domestic violence lawyers at legal aid agencies who were primarily doing trial court work and who happened to be interested in taking one of their cases up on appeal from time to time when they had time, which was rare. That was it. That was the statewide plan for appealing to domestic violence survivors and family law cases. It was not a good plan. In addition to the fact that no one was out there doing appeals at the time, that is exactly why, to me, it was crystal clear why this was a smart strategy. There's a need for it. I knew even as a fledgling organization with just one person that we could have this huge impact.
We've tried to do back-of-the-napkin calculations to figure out how many people we think are being impacted by our cases. At this point, since we’ve added over 50 published cases to California law on domestic violence topics, knowing how many people go through the California court system, the state of 40 million people, knowing how many people go through the family court system each year, and estimating how many of them have domestic violence issues, we think that we are helping over 230,000 Californians every year with our published case law. We're having a large impact.
I realized looking around me that society was off-kilter and I wanted to do what I could to fix that. I went to a women's college where I wanted to do education policy. If we could fix the schools, get rid of those tracks, integrate everybody, and make the school the launching point for everyone, societal issues will all be solved.
In my first year of law school, I interned at the Department of Education and realized that was not going to be the way to make a change for me. Certainly, lots of good work is done there, but nothing felt like I was making a direct impact. I quickly had to look around and figure out, “At this law school, I'm going to have this degree. I want to make an impact. Where can I do that?” I was honored to take some amazing civil rights courses and realized that as a White person, I should not be involved in trying to lead a racial justice movement because the voices of the folks who are impacted should be leading. I was then like, “What do I do?”
I ended up working in mental health because those are folks who often are not empowered with their voices but a lawyer can give them a voice. I started in the public interest. I've had a lot of public interest careers. I was very lucky, not on the basis of my work in gender-based violence or domestic violence but because I know legal services and have worked a lot with law students to come to the Family Violence Appellate Project where we work hard to give law students a fantastic way to use what they're learning to make an impact right now. That's how I ended up where we are.
I ended up working in mental health because the people I serve there often lack the power to speak for themselves. As a lawyer, I can help give them a voice.
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Jamie Beck - Free to Thrive
Jamie Beck, Founder, President, and Managing Attorney of Free to Thrive.
When I went to law school, I was a bleeding heart public-interest-lawyer-to-be who knew that I wanted to go to law school to do something to help people as many of us do not know exactly what that would look like. For me, firstly, I was passionate and still am about Housing Law and discrimination in housing. I went to law school during the 2008 housing crisis. I did pro bono work in law school for distressed homeowners and became very passionate about that.
I went to law school knowing I wanted to have an impact and was feeling out what areas I felt like I could have an impact on. I graduated from law school. I was fortunate to get a clerkship, which was an incredible learning opportunity. That clerkship led me to an opportunity in private practice to work at a large law firm in San Diego.
Knowing that I wanted to go into public interest work, I also knew that my student loans would be debilitating once I had a public interest salary. I decided to go into private practice for the financial security of that with the goal of paying down my student loans as quickly as I could, and finding my path back to private practice.
I talk to a lot of law students about that decision because I have so many law students who come to me and say, “I want to go into public interest. I want to help people, but I don't know how to do that with student loans.” What I always say is, “There are so many different ways to give back. You can give back in private practice.”
Many lawyers dedicate so much time to volunteer work and pro bono work. That was certainly what I did to fill my cup while I was in private practice, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There are a lot of opportunities at large firms to do a lot of impactful work. That's what I did. I dove as soon as I could. I started taking pro bono cases. I got very involved with our feminist bar association called the Lawyers Club of San Diego. That was what put me on the path to this work.
As Lawyers Club made a strategic initiative around human trafficking, I started learning more about it. We did educational programs around human trafficking. I ended up founding our human trafficking collaborative as a tool to engage the legal community around this issue. What I discovered was that there was not a non-profit in San Diego providing direct legal representation to human trafficking survivors. After taking pro bono cases, training lawyers on how to do this work, and doing policy work and advocacy around the issue of human trafficking, I found that I was incredibly passionate about this. I felt like there was a gap that I could fill.
I had no idea what I was doing starting a nonprofit. They don't teach you anything about running a business or a nonprofit in law school, so there was a very steep learning curve. I ended up leaving private practice after five years and starting Free to Thrive and doing this work full-time. It has been five years since I have been doing it full-time and six years since I started Free to Thrive. It has been an incredible journey. That's how I found my way to this work.
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Theresa Harris - AAAS Center for Scientific Responsibility and Justice
Theresa Harris, Program Director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Human Rights, and Law Program.
I started toward a very different career. I have a degree in Anthropology and then started in graduate school toward Archeology and ended up going into Urban Planning. Part of that was because Anthropology and Archeology were becoming more academic. I felt like that wasn't a good fit for me. I wanted to do something to make the world a better place. I was like, “How is this making the world better?” Now I know better, so I don't want any of the academic scientists I work with to be concerned about that.
I went into urban planning, which at least in school or in my Master's degree, was very focused on making the world a better place by creating jobs, affordable housing, economic development, making the streets better, and protecting the environment. I found my home. I was very at home in that. I got my degree and went into that field.
I worked in urban planning, land use, zoning, environmental impacts, and transportation impacts. I could explain how the engineers come up with decisions about highways and things like that. I did that for eight years in Florida. Somewhere along the way, I got discouraged because, at the same time, through that, I was a human rights activist. I started in high school with my high school Amnesty International chapter. I was involved in that in college. I was volunteering with a refugee resettlement group in Florida while I was working in planning.
I felt like there was this huge disconnect between what I was doing nights and weekends and what I was doing during the day. These were all issues. Where do the schools go? Where is affordable housing if there was affordable housing? These are all human rights decisions, but human rights weren't part of it. I was discouraged by that and I thought, “How can I connect all of this? How can I make this click?”
I had two people I knew in the world who were lawyers at the time. They were both working very much in public interest law. They both said, “Go to law school but make sure you get clinical experience. Make sure you go to a school where you have a lot of experiential learning and those kinds of things because of what you want to do. Make sure to go to a strong public interest program.” That's what I looked for. I went to American University. I did all the human rights things I could because I felt like it was this big do-over in my life.
From there into exactly what people think a human rights lawyer is, I joke, “What you think Amal Clooney does probably is what I did.” I did human rights litigation. I was at the World Organization for Human Rights USA. We did impact litigation for survivors of torture and human trafficking. We were doing asylum for survivors of forced marriage. We were establishing trafficking and forced marriage as grounds for asylum. We were working in that space. These were some free speech issues and important cases that I got an incredible amount of experience, but I still felt like I left all that other stuff behind.
I was invited to speak at AAAS at the first Science and Human Rights Coalition meeting on a panel that was called She Speaks Science, He Speaks Human Rights. The point of the panel was to bring together human rights activists and scientists who had worked across those communities and talk about what had happened, how that worked, what the pitfalls were, and what worked well. It was incredibly inspiring to be part of that, which we had used scientific evidence in several of our cases. I felt, “This is what I want to do. I can finally connect what I was doing before law school with the law.” A position opened up and I was offered the job, so here I am.
The program I'm in now, which is scientific responsibility, human rights, and law, has been around in different modes and different forms for 50 years. It came out of protest in the ‘60s and ‘70s insisting that scientists be more aware of their social responsibilities, and their responsibilities for human rights, that they take that into account in what they do, and that professional societies have a responsibility for human rights.
That history, legacy, and all the work that has evolved out of it spoke to me as somebody who came out of public interest law. There was the opportunity to not only continue to work in human rights in a way that is meaningful to me, but also think about how we could continue to build a public interest science career track and opportunities in ways that public interest law has and is still building as opportunities, pathways, and ways to make an impact with the law. It's very winding.
I remember when I was still in law school a mentor told us about her career pathway and said, “You can't get typecast. There's always a next, a pivot, and an open door. Don't worry about making a choice that is going to be, “You'll be doing that forever.” It never happens. That has been the case for me coming from all these different backgrounds.
You can't get typecast! There's always a next step, a chance to pivot, an open door. So don't worry about making a choice that will lock you in forever – it never happens.
AAAS, as an organization, was established in 1848. It was one of the first, in the US, scientific member organizations. It publishes the journal of Science. Lots of people know Science Magazine. We are a three-part organization. There’s the publication side, Science and the Science Family of Journals. We have a membership component that is important. We have 120,000 scientists who are members of AAAS. That has continued since 1848.
We also have a program component. That is a little bit newer than 1848. It’s 50-ish years old. That came out of a recognition both from the membership and also from the scientific community more broadly that scientists needed to be more directly engaged in policy and society. Our motto is, “In the service of science, in the service of society.”
In the late ‘60s or ‘70s, they said, “We're going to create some programs to make that real.” The Science and Human Rights program was created. The Scientific Freedom and Responsibility program was created. That eventually moved into recognizing the need for science to get involved in the law. That was in the ‘80s and ‘90s when junk science was becoming recognized. We had Supreme Court cases going through AAAS and the National Academies of Science. We were on an amicus brief in the Dover case. That was where that part of the work came from.
We are one program, Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights, and Law of seven programs within AAAS. There's also the Science Diplomacy program that places scientists in Federal agencies, congressional offices, and fellowships. It is so that those offices, the legislature, and the executive branch can learn from scientists and the scientists can learn how the government works to better improve how they do their science. We also have a program that puts students into mass media fellowships. That's part of the fellowship program. We’re training students who want to be science journalists.
We have a large program that is focused on increasing opportunities in science, education, and careers to make the community more inclusive. We have a diversity, equity, and inclusion program. That includes a project called SEA Change that's working in scientific departments and universities to think about gender, disability, and race and how can the department itself be more inclusive. It’s looking at the systems that are in place that are maybe preventing that and thinking about attrition, retention, and things like that. It’s going from top to bottom in the culture of the organization. It's based on a similar program called Athena SWAN in the UK, but it's a fascinating project by itself.
We have diversity, equity, and inclusion, science education projects. We have a project called SciLine that connects scientists with journalists. It’s a fantastic project and program. We have one called EPI Center that is creating and making scientific evidence available to policymakers at the Federal state and local levels to make sure they have access to information to make decisions. They don't advocate for any particular policy but make sure that the decisions that are made are based on evidence and that the evidence is available and accessible.
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Antoinette Naddour - Veterans Legal Institute®
Antoinette Naddour, Executive Director and Cofounder of Veterans Legal Institute.
When I was young, my parents immigrated to the United States. None of the women or men in my family had ever gone to college because they couldn't have afforded it. They all started work early. Both of my parents were focused on the idea of education and the American dream. My mom specifically told me, “In the United States, you can be anything that you want to be as long as it's a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer.” I'm like, “I don't like blood, so I can't be a doctor. I still don't understand what engineers do, so lawyer it is.” My parents both supported me throughout my journey to go to college and eventually law school. Here I am today.
I always knew that I wanted to work with some sort of vulnerable population, so I started doing community service through my church at a young age. I liked the social aspect of it. I liked how it made me feel. I felt good. I felt like I was contributing to society. I knew that if I had a law degree, I would be in a more powerful position. Maybe my pen could make a difference or my legal mind could make a change, whether it be a policy or someone's life that otherwise couldn't access justice because they couldn't afford it.
I spent six years in the California State Guard, primarily doing JAG work, which is judge advocate work, working as an attorney. In my final days with them, I did a lot with StratCom, which is Strategic Communications. I spent about five years practicing privately, doing real estate and business civil litigation. Primarily, I was doing that because I had law school debt and I needed to pay it off. Unfortunately, the nonprofit industry can't compete salary-wise with what we're making in the private sector. I had to establish that first, especially living in Orange County where the cost of living is so high.
Once I was able to get that squared away, I applied to Equal Justice Works to become an AmeriCorps Legal Fellow. I was awarded that fellowship and was stationed with a local legal aid for a couple of years as a Fellow also working with vulnerable populations. I stayed there afterward, but I thought there was such a need for Military-specific legal services. The reason we have Military homelessness and such a high rate of suicide amongst former service members is different from their civilian counterparts. If you don't have that understanding or insight, it's hard to serve your clients or advocate for them the right way.
While I was working there, I used to volunteer at the emergency shelter, which was at the National Guard Armory. I noticed that there was an unusually high percentage of homeless veterans. I thought, “This is so strange. Veterans are leaders, politicians, business owners, and executives. They run Fortune 500 companies. Why am I seeing so many homeless veterans at this shelter?”
I started doing a little research. This was prior to veterans being on the map. Now, we're seeing it more. It’s more of a popular bi-partisan topic. People come together and are becoming more patriotic. They want to serve those who served our country. Ten or fifteen years ago, people weren't talking about it. It was a relatively new idea.
I noticed that, for example, for California legal aids that are IOLTA funded, meaning they get funded by the state bar, they must go by income eligibility. If a veteran is 100% service-connected or disabled, they receive approximately $30,000 to $33,000 a month. That automatically can disqualify them from being income-eligible for legal aid. What happens is they'll be eligible for legal services but too poor to afford a private attorney all because of their disability. I wanted to start an organization that doesn't have to have funding with those strings attached.
We did eventually get IOLTA funded. We did, at the Veterans Legal Institute, co-sponsor a bill with Senator Tom Umberg’s office to waive service-connected compensation, which is disability compensation of veterans for purposes of eligibility for IOLTA funding. Now veterans statewide can qualify otherwise as long as they don't have a high income in other areas. Their disability income isn't going to count or discriminate against them based on their disability.
It was a leap of faith. I spoke with a few people in the community, both the legal and business community that I respect a lot, and asked for their opinion. I drafted a business plan. I didn't, at the time, have seed funding, so I looked into, “How long can I do this without taking a salary? How long can I survive? What's it going to cost me? How much is it going to be out of my pocket? What are the potential funding sources out there?”
Fortunately, it has been about eight years and Veterans Legal Institute has close to twenty employees but it has been an uphill battle. Every day brings new opportunities and new challenges. It’s easy to say, “I want to provide free legal services. I don't want any veterans to ever receive any bill.” We don’t take cases on contingency. We don’t take a percentage. The veteran and the veteran’s family keep everything. It’s this idea or concept of, “How do I keep funding this operation so that I can meet the needs of those who sacrificed everything for our freedom?”