Marianna Chapleau is CALA's Newest Boardmember

CALA is honored and thrilled to have Marianna Chapleau join our board of directors. Marianna  is an associate in the Chicago office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP where she represents clients in a wide range of trial and appellate proceedings, including litigation related to securities fraud, breach of contract, corporate governance, consumer fraud, and contested matters in bankruptcy court.  Marianna has also argued in front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in her representation of pro bono clients in civil rights litigation.

Before joining Kirkland, Marianna served as a law clerk at the Office of the Solicitor General of Texas and as a law clerk for the Honorable Jacques L. Wiener, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, Louisiana.  Marianna worked with clients as a member of the Exoneration Project during law school. Marianna graduated from the University of Chicago Law School, where she served as Managing Editor of The University of Chicago Law Review.  She graduated with distinction from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and Spanish.

She brings to the board a unique, valuable perspective and a particular interest in helping CALA establish its initial clinics. CALA is enormously grateful for Marianna's support. 

Sharlyn Grace Joins CALA as Staff Attorney and Coordinator of Community Legal Education

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Sharlyn Grace is CALA's new staff attorney and Coordinator of Community Legal Education

CALA is extremely pleased to introduce Sharlyn Grace as its new staff attorney. Sharlyn is passionate about using the law to support movements for social change and working with community partners to make legal services more impactful and relevant. At CALA, one of Sharlyn's roles will be coordinating our community legal education initiatives. Prior to joining CALA, she was an Americorps VISTA attorney at LAF (formerly Legal Assistance Foundation), where she coordinated the Juvenile Expungement Help Desk at the Cook County Juvenile Center. In that position, she developed a model of hosting pro bono expungement clinics for CPS students in alternative high schools. During her year at LAF, she presented more than 100 community member and service provider trainings. Sharlyn currently sits on the Board of Directors of the National Lawyers Guild of Chicago. She is a proud graduate of Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, where she participated in both the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Clinic and the Prisoners' Rights Clinic.

In Sharlyn's own words: 

1.      Tell us a little about yourself. I am a new attorney who is passionate about using the law to support movements for social change and working with community partners to make legal services more impactful and relevant. 

2.      What does community activism lawyering mean to you? Why is it important? Community activism lawyering is a blend of community lawyering (bringing legal services into neighborhoods and making them responsive to community needs) and movement lawyering, which directly supports social change initiatives. It's important because traditional legal services alone cannot address the source of legal problems--only activism can do that. Keeping an individual in their home is vital work, but it doesn't stop their neighbor from being evicted the following week.

3.      What do you most look forward to as an attorney at CALA?  I am very excited about working with our organizational partners and implementing their ideas on how to provide better legal services to their communities. 

4.      What do you think are the most pressing issues facing attorneys in Chicago today? Cuts to legal services funding are hard, and funder emphasis on quantity of cases and traditional litigation outcomes often leaves less space for creative solutions.

5.      Facing activists? Likewise, I think lack of resources is always a problem, especially for grassroots efforts; however, I am very inspired by all the organizing against privatization, exclusion, and criminalization happening here in Chicago.

6.      What is one thing you want everyone to know about you? That I am really committed to this model, and am extremely open to feedback or suggestions on how I/we can do better. New projects can always benefit from dialogue.

7.      One unique/unusual tidbit about you? I have four chickens in my backyard, and I'm a bicycle mechanic.

8.      Final thought? Feel free to reach out to me at sharlyn@calachicago.org!

CALA is extremely fortunate to have someone as committed to community activism lawyering join its staff.  

 

 

 

 

 

CALA's 1st Clinic Opening October 14th in Little Village

      The Community Activism Law Alliance is extremely excited to announce that our first community activism law clinic will open on October 14, 2014 in partnership with Enlace Chicago. The “community activism law clinic” will serve the Little Village community. CALA and Enlace believe that this clinic will provide a valuable, free resource for residents in Little Village.  The clinic will be open every Tuesday evening from 5:00pm-8:00pm. Individuals and families who need legal assistance can either walk in during those hours, or schedule an appointment in advance. The Enlace Clinic will also be open every Friday for follow-up appointments. 

The Enlace Community Activism Law Clinic will be full-service: providing a wide-range of services from advice, extended assistance, representation, to community legal education.  Priority will be given to clients who are low-income residents of Little Village, and whose cases relate to Enlace’s programmatic areas:  violence prevention, immigration, housing, and education. Legal services, including full representation, will be completely free of charge to clients. Additionally, the Enlace Clinic will support Enlace’s DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) processing workshops.  

Enlace Chicago is a grassroots, community organization dedicated to making a positive difference in the lives of the residents of the Little Village community[LH1]  by fostering a physically safe and healthy environment in which to live and by championing opportunities for educational advancement and economic development. The Little Village community continues to be one of Chicago’s most densely populated neighborhoods with a high percentage of youth. However, it also continues to be one of the communities with the least amount of green space per capita. The working-class residents of the Little Village community quietly support the way of life of all Chicagoans. Its residents staff restaurants throughout the city. They provide daily assistance as laborers in industries like manufacturing, landscaping, service, and construction. Yet its residents do not have access to the same opportunities available to those who employ them. Neighborhood schools fall below state standards. Children play on the streets due to a lack of parks, playgrounds, and green space. Residents must consistently face the violence that sporadically erupts between gangs. Enlace Chicago works to improve these conditions through a preventative and proactive approach, including education, organizing, and that strengthens families, the neighborhood, and thereby, the city. Through four program areas:  community education, community & economic development, organizing & advocacy, and violence prevention, Enlace Chicago directly serves more than 8,000 youth and adults annually.

For further information about the Enlace Community Activism Law Clinic, please contact us at cala@calachicago.org or 312-999-0056.

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.