CALA Wins $10K Grant from Skadden Foundation

The Community Activism Law Alliance was selected as one of the 7 recipients of the 2014 Flom Incubator Grants from the Skadden Fellowship Foundation. CALA will use the funding to provide community legal education and outreach to immigrants in the Chicago metropolitan area. 

95% of all immigrants in Illinois live in the Chicago metropolitan area. The total suburban immigrant population has increased to over 1.2 million in 2010, with expected continued growth, while the available legal services in the suburbs have drastically been reduced. To address this imbalance, CALA will create a suburban immigrant rights outreach and training pilot program to provide free outreach, trainings, and workshops on immigration law and rights. 

The program would consist of monthly programs held in different locations in suburbs outside of Chicago, where there are large immigrant communities. CALA staff will work with our community partners to create “know-your-rights” materials and presentations targeted towards suburban immigrant populations, in both English and Spanish.  Additionally, we will explore different strategies and methodologies for reaching out to and effectively educating immigrants about their legal rights. Our goal, in addition to the provision of the legal services, would be a fully-developed curriculum of materials—pamphlets, flyers, training guides, resource referrals, infographics, and presentations. The project would additionally help us to create a report analyzing approaches for conducting outreach to (immigrant) communities.  

For more information about the Skadden Fellowship Foundation and the Flom Incubator Grant, visit: http://www.skaddenfellowships.org/.

Two CALA Clinics Opening Up Soon

         CALA is in the process of finalizing logistics for its first two community-based activism law clinics: one serving the Little Village community and one for Chicago-area immigrants. Both clinics will be up and running by October. Each independent clinic will cater specifically to the needs of the community served; they will be operated in a collaboration with a community partner, who will assist with the clinic's operations. The clinics will offer a full-range of free legal services to low-income members of the community. The services will include advice, extended assistance for self-advocacy, supervised pro bono representation, trainings and pro-se workshops, as well as full legal representation. The clinics will be holistic, client-centered, and community-responsive. That is, every client will receive at least some form of assistance, while those clients with cases falling into priority areas (identified by community members) are eligible to receive free legal representation.   

         Stay tuned for more details of each clinic and CALA's selected partner community organizations. 

CALA mentioned in Harvard Law Today (on the front front page!)

Excerpt; read full article here: http://today.law.harvard.edu/twenty-three-hls-receive-public-service-venture-fund-grants/

Lam Ho ’08 has been awarded a seed grant to establish the Community Activism Law Alliance (CALA) in Chicago. This new nonprofit organization will bring legal services directly to disadvantaged communities that otherwise do not have access to legal assistance. It will use an innovative practice model—community activism lawyering—not only to provide legal services but also to support grassroots activism in the community. This will be accomplished through law clinics located directly in the communities they serve in collaboration with local activist organizations. Local partner organizations include Enlace Chicago, theSex Workers Outreach Project, the Immigrant Youth Justice League and Organized Communities Against Deportation.

After graduating from Harvard Law School, Ho joined Chicago’s Legal Assistance Foundation as a staff attorney through the Skadden Foundation Public Interest Fellowship. During his time at LAF, he established and ran 10 community-based clinics providing free legal services to youth and their families on the west side of Chicago. He experienced firsthand the challenges of community lawyering and civil legal services, and was inspired to confront these challenges through the creation of CALA.

Before joining LAF, Ho was very involved in legal services at Harvard Law School, serving as president of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. He also worked as a research/teaching assistant to Professor Lucie White and a student attorney in theHarvard Defenders Program, while participating in several on-campus organizations and activities, including the Model Campus Sexual Assault Project, the Big Brothers Big Sisters Program, the Harvard Law Record, the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and LAMBDA. In his three years at the law school, Ho worked with two off-campus organizations – Reaching Out About Depression, in Cambridge, and the Gay-Straight Alliance, in Brockton, Mass., which he co-founded when he was in high school. He completed summer internships at the ACLU National Legal Department in New York City, the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute in Boston, and the Urban Justice Center in New York City. He also founded and ran the HLS Chapter of the Giving Tree, a charity organization he had started as an undergraduate.

Ho received multiple awards during his time at HLS, including the 13th Annual NALP/ PSLawNet (now PSJD) Pro Bono Publico Award; the Gary Bellow Public Service Award; the Maria, Gabriella, & Robert Skirnick Public Interest Fellowship; the HLS Dean’s Award for Community Leadership; the Kaufman Pro Bono Service Award; the Beinecke Scholarship; the Point Foundation Scholarship; the Sonnenschein Scholars Summer Public Interest Fellowship; and the Lenn Thrower ’83 Memorial Fellowship for Research in Queer Studies.

Since finishing his Skadden Fellowship in 2010, Ho has worked as a staff attorney for Equip for Equality, where he represents children with disabilities and their families at all levels of administrative and judicial proceedings in state and federal courts. In 2014, the Governor of Illinois appointed Hothe chairperson of the Illinois HIV/AIDS Response Review Panel, a state commission on HIV prevention and treatment in the Illinois prison system.

Ho graduated magna cum laude from Brown University in 2001 with an A.B. and M.A. in English. He received his M.St. in English in 2003 from the University of Oxford, after having received the Marshall Scholarship.