President of the Shriver Center in Chicago starting in 2007. Played a key role in the organization’s path of not taking LSC or other government money.
Oral history details
| Storyteller: | John Bouman |
|---|---|
| Interviewer: | Houseman, Alan |
| Date of interview: | Dec 7, 2017 |
| Where relates to: | Illinois |
| Topics: | Civil legal aid: General, LSC: Restrictions, Public benefits, and Support centers |
| Law type: | |
| Collection: | NEJL |
| Length: | 1:08:13 |
Full text of transcript
Download PDF: TranscriptConsortium for the National Equal Justice Library
Oral History Collection
Interview with John Bouman
Conducted by Alan Houseman
December 7, 2017
Alan Houseman:
This is an oral history of John Bouman who is the director of the Shriver Center on National Poverty Law. The interviewer is Alan Houseman for the National Equal Justice Library. We’re in Washington D.C. on December 7th, 2017.
Alan Houseman:
Let’s begin John with a brief overview of your life. Where you grew up, where you went to college and law school, and your jobs that you’ve held.
John Bouman:
Okay. Born in 1949 in Melrose Park, Illinois. Grew up thereabouts in a neighboring town called Oak Park. Went to Lutheran grade school and high school because my dad was a Lutheran school teacher. Went to Valparaiso University in Indiana. Then after a year in the workforce went back to law school also at Valparaiso. Undergrad, BA in History in 1971, and law school 1975.
John Bouman:
I went straight from law school to a job at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago, which, when I started there, wasn’t yet funded by LSC. But it was close. It was in the process of that changeover. Then within the first six months that I was there, the Legal Assistance Foundation became the independent and sole grantee of the LSC funds.
John Bouman:
For the first five years I worked in a Chicago neighborhood called Uptown. Was a general staff attorney. It’s the melting pot neighborhood in Chicago, it’s kind of like Queens. All the many different ethnicities and languages and immigrant groups. But also there were many Native Americans and southern whites, hillbillies if you will, and African Americans … and then just regular Chicago poor people.
John Bouman:
The last two years of that I worked in a specialist unit for senior citizens. So that was an interesting thing there, and the supervisor of that was a guy named Tim Jost who’s now a professor and a commentator on the Affordable Care Act and related issues. From ’80 to ’85 I was the supervisor of the office in Englewood on Chicago’s South Side. That’s around 63rd Street and Halsted. That was the farthest south neighborhood office that LAF had. But the city goes down well into the one hundreds, one thirties. So it was a vast area, predominantly African American.
John Bouman:
During those five years of the early 80s was when America went through a recession and the steel mills closed in that part of Chicago. So it was a massive foreclosure crisis, in many ways worse than the one we just had in the Great Recession. So it was interesting and it was an 11-lawyer office on the South Side. It was also the hotbed and birth place of the LAF union, which had happened before I went there. From ’85 on I was the organization’s lead specialist in public benefits. That meant I moved to the downtown general office, they called it. I was the lead specialist in public benefits other than Medicaid, which had its own unit.
John Bouman:
I did that until ’96 when the troubles happened with the Clinton/Gingrich showdown and the compromise and the restrictions on legal services. That’s when my team and I left LAF to join with what had been the National Clearinghouse for Legal Services. It was coincidentally located in Chicago, but was always a national communications hub. They had been completely defunded in that same budget, so our dual goal was to perpetuate the Clearinghouse role in legal services nationally and to perpetuate policy and systemic advocacy for people in poverty in Illinois. We’ve evolved since then. Want me to keep going?
Alan Houseman:
Yeah.
John Bouman:
So we went through — last Saturday I had a chance to summarize this for our board — two 10 year periods. We had a 10 year period where the CEO was Rita McLennon, who had been the AD of the Clearinghouse, where we were in crisis and trying to survive and gradually becoming more and more stable. We had to completely rebuild the board from a statutory board to a more typical fundraising and relationship-type governance board. And we had to transition from close to 100% government funding to no government funding. We didn’t want government funding.
John Bouman:
I actually deliberately decided not to try to get clauses in the Illinois statutes creating IOLTA and the other state funding sources that would allow for the funding of lobbying and class actions, because I just didn’t want it. I didn’t want any government to have that kind of leverage over us, given the kind of work we do. And figured we just had to teach ourselves how to do it the other way.
John Bouman:
From day one we had great support from the Chicago philanthropic community, and that’s why we’re still here. And Rita was, I hope you’re going to interview Rita, she was fantastic. She bore it on her shoulders really. I became CEO in 2007, and it really opened my eyes, just all the stuff she was protecting me from all those years. Her discipline is development, which was a really good fit because I was then the leader of the advocacy program, Lisa Hirch was the leader of the Clearinghouse, and Rita was the CEO and chief fundraiser, although I from day one did most of the foundation fundraising. But she rebuilt the board, she pulled together an amazing ad hoc group of Chicago leaders to help us through that, had great consulting help, gradually professionalized us more and so forth.
John Bouman:
Our second 10 year period, roughly coinciding with when I took over in ’07, was I think more entrepreneurial. We grew, we tried stuff, we took chances in the framework of a strategic plan. Even while Rita was still there, we wanted the advocacy work to have more of a national flavor in the sense of being multi-state, aimed at the same audience that consumed the stuff in the Clearinghouse. So we gradually got more national in that sense with our advocacy work, just through co-counseling and consulting and ad hoc working groups and so on.
John Bouman:
The through line of all this was that we kept pounding out outcomes. I mean we didn’t miss a beat on the advocacy on welfare reform, on big litigation on Medicaid, on housing cases, breakthrough things on criminal justice reform. So in 2010, even while we were still evolving, we got a MacArthur Award for creative and effective institutions, which was a million dollars. And the first thing I did with that was to try to do the right thing with people’s salaries who had been very patient and to get us closer to market value to nonprofit lawyers, or public interest lawyers.
John Bouman:
We also, for the first time ever, had an operating reserve. It was not enough, but from close to ’96 through 2010 we were payroll to payroll, a little too exciting sometimes. In 2011, we merged with a Boston group called the Center for Legal Aid Education, which had grown out of Mass Law Reform as their training department. But they’d had become an independent nonprofit. They were kind of struggling to make it. They had very good training products, but they also were too small really to make it in the recession and it made sense for them to try to merge. It made sense for us to add a training department basically aimed at the same audience that reads the Clearinghouse Review. At the same time we also gradually took the Review from subscription to protected with a PIN to now free and open source and online. We don’t do the hard copy anymore. So that evolved through that period too.
John Bouman:
So in 2011 we added the training program. In about 2014, I think, we added the racial justice training institute to the training menu. Then around that same time we began to organize the Legal Impact Network. Alan, I know you’ve written about the old network of backup centers and I think the state … I think the state … What were they called?
Alan Houseman:
State support centers.
John Bouman:
State support centers. There was an organization,OLSBUC, right?
Alan Houseman:
Yes, Organization of Legal Services Back-up Centers.
John Bouman:
Yeah, in any event, unrestricted law and policy organizations for the poor had popped up around the country because it was an obvious need that the restrictions in ’96 had prevented the LSC-funded programs from filling. Now, in not every state did the legal services program do advocacy. But in many states it did. In Illinois the LAF was the leading law and policy group for the poor. So when we started the Shriver Center, that was the ball game in Illinois.
John Bouman:
So a lot of these organizations around the country are the old state backup centers, like Texas, Mass Law Reform, Empire Justice, Western Center, Florida Legal Services. We have now six or seven apple seeds. We have a bunch that just grew spontaneously like the Shriver Center did from different idiosyncratic factors in their state like the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty. And so we’re now up to 33 states in the Legal Impact Network, and 35 groups. We have a couple states with two groups. We’re building a peer network of these unrestricted groups. It’s already pretty high functioning in terms of a peer network and a copycat network and a sharing of information and advice.
John Bouman:
The thing we’re working on figuring out now is how do you deploy this thing — plan and coordinate multi state advocacy, or message campaigns, things like that. It’s difficult because all the political environments are so different. There are deep, deep red states — we’ve got almost every state in the South now — and many in the high plains. The missing states, interestingly, are in the Midwest and in the mountains. I mean, go figure, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Indiana, don’t have unrestricted legal services groups.
John Bouman:
Rita, starting right away in ’96, made it her business to cultivate Sargent Shriver himself and found some ways and people she knew in Chicago to get introductions, and visited him out here in Maryland a few times at his home. This was before he was severely debilitated by his Alzheimer’s. The time came when he said, “Yes, you can use my name. This is part of the original vision we had and I’d be honored to be helpful.”
John Bouman:
It didn’t come with an endowment or anything like that, but an amazing amount of prestige and borrowed stature from him. So we had already renamed the organization the National Center on Poverty Law, instead of the National Clearinghouse for Legal Services. So then it became, I think it was around 2001, the Sergeant Shriver National Center on Poverty Law. The Shriver siblings and children of Sargent Shriver are all distinguished in their own right. They all run nonprofits and they all have fiduciary duties elsewhere. But they have a foundation that was actually created by Congress for them to memorialize their father. In 2012, they gave us an endowment gift from that foundation. A small endowment, but for us it was significant. It was a million dollars. And also we were able, and they were fully supportive of this, to position that as a lead gift in a major donor campaign, where we wanted to raise the money, but really what we wanted to do was to learn how to do that and to have a major donor fundraising capacity.
John Bouman:
And that’s a big learning curve for me, because they don’t teach it in law school. The big eye opener there is figuring out how much time it takes. You actually can’t do some of the other stuff that you might like to do more because you have to spend so much time cultivating people. But you can see that it’s an important growth area for the long term stability and capacity of the organization to survive leadership changes and to be there for the long haul. So that’s where we’re at right now.
Alan Houseman:
So let me go back a little bit. Describe what the original Clearinghouse Review did. You indicated what you did with it, so describe what it did and why did you move to what you did with it?
John Bouman:
So the Clearinghouse was part of the original planning for the legal services component of the war on poverty, the OEO program. I think it was either Earl Johnson or Clinton Bamberger who had the idea that this should be part of the program. The idea was that they didn’t want the program to be isolated storefronts in poor neighborhoods across the country. They wanted programs to be linked together and function in collaboration with one another, to function like a national law firm for the poor.
John Bouman:
The glue for that, or the hub, was a communication strategy housed in the Clearinghouse. There were two main pieces of it. One was a monthly journal called the Clearinghouse Review. The other was massive brief bank, or document bank. All the lawyers around the country, if they were doing something that seemed to be of interest or a breakthrough or a good new program, would send their papers to the Clearinghouse. Every month in the back of the Clearinghouse Review, there were short summaries of all the new case materials that they’d gotten from around the country. So if I’m sitting in my cinderblock in Englewood on the south side of Chicago, I would read my Clearinghouse Review and I’d see what the guy in Brooklyn or the guy in Pueblo, Colorado was doing in an eviction case, or an ingenious way to beat a deficiency on a car contract or one of those things, from a big civil rights matter to a public benefits matter.
John Bouman:
I could order this stuff, snail mail, from Clearinghouse Review and I’d get my envelope a few days later with the xerox copies of the stuff. It was amazing. The Clearinghouse Review also had action research, deeper dive kind of law review type writing in it, and it was the job bulletin board for Legal Services. So under the sleepy guise of a journal, it was an incredibly powerful organizing tool, and it spawned dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe more than that, of viral change movements with people copying each other. Then you would go to the NLADA conferences and you’d see the people who’d written stuff and you had this sense of being part of a movement and of having colleagues around the country. I thought it was tremendously powerful and really, really strongly did not want it to go away.
John Bouman:
I’m not sure that the Gingrich forces targeted it, because if they did then they understood the power of it better than we did. For them I think it was just a spending line and they were just cutting stuff. So right away in ’96 we had to put a subscription on it in order to sustain it. We didn’t have any money. Even with the subscription amount, there was an amazing response from the legal aid community which had undergone deep cuts in that budget and the restrictions and all this upheaval. Most of them subscribed. So that’s a tribute to them and it’s a tribute to the understood power of what the role of the Clearinghouse was.
John Bouman:
Even with that subscription income though, from day one we were subsidizing it, and we always did. The staff and the costs and the publication and so on, it never paid for itself. Only rarely were we able to attract foundation funding, and then usually it was as a part of a different kind of advocacy where one piece of it would be a Clearinghouse article or something, but never funding for the core editorial and production staff.
John Bouman:
It was important for the mission. But I thought it was also important for us as an organization because it was our foothold outside of Illinois as a player in helping legal aid for the poor succeed around the country. So we took it out of hard copy production and on to our website where it’s called the Clearinghouse Community, because with the audience the name has a brand. We didn’t want to change the name too much, but it’s the same kind of law review type articles, but now we have more of the interactive. You know, there’s webinars, there’s chats, there’s interviews, there’s advocacy stories, you know, how did you do that kind of stuff. It’s got thousands of readers and we took it gradually, as I said before, from subscription to free but restricted, to wide open, which is where it is now.
Alan Houseman:
Right, so I wanna go back even further. While you were in LAF, describe some of the significant advocacy work you did.
John Bouman:
You know, I was really fortunate to be there during that time. The director at the time was a guy named Sheldon Roodman. His federal advocacy director was Jim Wile Who’s now at FRAC and was at Children’s Defense Fund for many years. The state advocacy director was Jim Leturner. They had this program model where all the lawyers were responsible for both direct service and what we called in those days “law reform work”. In those days that was mostly class actions or appeals, we weren’t doing much lobbying at the time. What that meant was that, if you were a frontline lawyer in the neighborhood, of your caseload of 50 to 70 cases, three, four, five, six of them would be bigger focus projects. You not only could do that, you were expected to do that.
John Bouman:
So you were on a team on a class action, or maybe you were on a team doing comments on rulemaking. Most of it was litigation. If you showed the stuff, you could first chair litigation if it was your client, although the more experienced people would be on it, usually be the first chair. So from day one, I had the opportunity and from the organization, not just permission, but impetus to engage in wider focus work. That was very consistent with my training in law school where my clinic was federal practice. We did nothing but complex federal litigation in my law school clinic.
John Bouman:
So my understanding of what it meant to represent the poor has always included that. That’s just part of what you do. At LAF, you had the subject matter specialist, they were predominantly doing the law reform work. But they also had responsibility for direct service, maybe a small case load, but responsibility to advise the neighborhood people in their subject matter on their individual cases and to provide training for them in those matters. When I was a public benefits supervisor, I did trainings on the complex rules for how you budget monthly grants, or how you figure out eligibility for Medicaid or food stamps. I did all those trainings.
John Bouman:
For the first 10 years when I was in those neighborhood offices, I didn’t specialize in anything. I had class actions and appeals in housing, consumer, Medicaid, public benefits, federally subsidized housing, a lot of Social Security appeals, a lot of state court appeals in administrative review matters. I’m trying to remember some of those cases. One of them didn’t become a big litigation because the opponent caved in. It was a ghetto credit furniture store. We were able to poke a hole in their contract that they violated the lending act, I think. The collection lawyer made a deal with me and said, “Anybody citywide, if you get a Nelson Brothers case, don’t litigate the contract. Give me a call. The client can keep the furniture and make no further payments.”
John Bouman:
And so we had that deal in place for about two years in Chicago. Lawyers from around the city would call me in uptown and we’d have this deal. We had one of the first big conversions of federally subsidized housing and it was a federal APA case challenging HUD’s decision to allow them to go forward without enough subsidies in the building, so there was that case. This was an era though of very big and frequent Social Security litigation, a lot of class actions around the disability determination process. This was a classic example of Clearinghouse, NLADA, and in that particular line of work especially the National Senior Citizens Law Center with Eileen Sweeney in the lead, rest in peace.
John Bouman:
So we litigated on a class action basis things like whether they had to consider combined impairments, whether they had to consider functional capacity instead of just abstract medical tests, whether they had to obey the treating physician’s opinion above that of a specialist, and so on. Four or five of those things went to the Supreme Court. The biggest one probably was Zebley, the children’s SSI case. We had a case in Illinois that was leapfrogged, the two cases leapfrogged each other. Zebley ended up the flagship in the Supreme Court. Our case was called Marcus. It was the same issues.
Alan Houseman:
Yeah we’ve interviewed Johnny and Rich.
John Bouman:
Yeah. That was a remarkable case and they did a wonderful job on it and we were very collegial the whole time. The other big one was one called City of New York versus whoever it was, Shalala or somebody. But City of New York was about the right way to look at mental impairments. The reason it was City of New York is because in those days the city general counsel’s office had an affirmative litigation office. They partnered with Legal Aid on getting good federal disability determinations, because that would shift these people off of state and local benefit programs and onto the national one.
John Bouman:
So there was a lot of that work. I was on a lot of welfare class actions, one involving child support enforcement, several involving the timeliness of appeals, timeliness of applications, adjudications. We did a case in 1980 about the Senior Citizen Community Care Program, which was in-home care instead of going to the nursing home for seniors. They created that program in 1980. The case was called Benson vs. Blaser. It’s still a famous case. They had no process at all and there was no eligibility hierarchy. So they would start a new fiscal year, take applications and close intake the next day because they had a long waiting list. This was completely haphazard. So we litigated that and they settled it. I’m not sure we would have won. But they settled it right away and then that morphed into a big Medicaid waiver and that’s how they do it to this day. It’s in the Illinois Department on Aging. The Benson case has Annie’s Benson’s picture in the lobby of the Department of Aging. It was our client from a housing project in Chicago.
John Bouman:
Reagan started to try to rein in Legal Services in his view. He cut the funding in ’81 in OBRA, but he also had these requirements that you couldn’t do a class action against the government entity until you sent them a threat to sue letter. And you couldn’t do lobbying without a client with a retainer. We were all kind of upset. But actually both of those things turned out to be very good practice, and both of them conspired to turn me and us into lobbyists.
John Bouman:
The first time I sent a threat to sue letter to the Department of Public Aid, I forgot what it was about, but I got a call two days later asking, “What do you want?” I hadn’t even thought about that. I knew we had a violation. I knew we were gonna litigate it. I hadn’t thought about what we would settle for or what the resolution would be. It was a very short leap from that episode to within maybe two years tops, we were sending an annual list of issues to the general counsel’s office without a threat to sue, saying, “Here’s the problems we’re seeing. Here’s what we’d like to see fixed. Here’s the way we think you could tweak the statute.” We would have a meeting every year and resolve some of it. We’d back off on some of it because they’d bring more information to us. We would proceed with some of it. Some of it where there were legal claims they dug their heels in. We would send a threat to sue and proceed in that way. And sometimes we’d proceed with legislation and pass it over their objection.
John Bouman:
The nice thing for the lobbying work flowing out of the litigation like that was that we had already established our credibility when we said, “The law says something.” We proved over and over again in court that we’re right about stuff like that. That’s our capital, we represent people who have no money and don’t vote in high numbers. So what do you bring to the table that generates any kind of power? A very important part of that is the high quality of the information and the credibility you have for that. So people want your blessing, they want you on their side.
John Bouman:
The other thing is the implied threat that when the stars line up you can force them. The ability for poor people to take officials to court is the only real power they have where you can force somebody to do something they don’t want to do. So that’s always in the room even though you don’t say it, and it’s a good trick. But it’s also a good practice to have the kind of relationship with people who you sue that at the same time in the same physical space you can come to an amicable resolution on other things. It is not personal, even though it is sometimes, but you don’t behave as if it’s personal. You respect them enough and you’re pleasant enough that you can have decent conversations about things where you’re not in litigation.
Alan Houseman:
I want to ask this question before we go back to the Shriver Center: what factors led you to coming out of law school and going to LAF?
John Bouman:
Oh, I wanted to work there. I didn’t know that when I went to law school. When I went to law school I wasn’t terribly organized about it yet. I knew in some vague sense that I wanted to do some public interest, something about justice, maybe something about poverty, maybe something about sticking it to the man a little bit, which was going on in those days on campuses and so on.
John Bouman:
Also, the family business is clergy. I said my father was a Lutheran school teacher. But both grandfathers and about 10 uncles are pastors, and my older brother. I didn’t want to go into the family business but I had no role models at all who knew the first thing about making money. It was all some service oriented thing. I was going to be a lawyer but it ended up being some service oriented thing, apple falling close to the tree. As it evolved during law school and we did this fantastic federal practice clinic, it was extremely exciting to see what kind of impact you could have and how you really could bring a measure of justice to people. I never had much imagination about living anywhere else. I wanted to go back home and work for the legal aid place in my town. That was LAF.
John Bouman:
I didn’t know anyone who worked there except my law school roommate had applied and gotten a job there in the first round of hiring that year. They had two rounds of hiring that year because this was 1975 and they were expanding. They actually expanded every year until about ’79. You would know that better than I do, but that’s my memory of it. Anticipating Reagan I think they leveled off, and then he cut it. So I was in the second wave of hiring. I had inside information to get in on the next round from my roommate who was living in my basement as we studied for the bar together back at home. That’s when I got hired. Fortuitous.
Alan Houseman:
So, when you got to the Shriver Center and you were director of advocacy there for 10 years, what were some of the examples of big advocacy projects or campaigns that you were you involved with?
John Bouman:
Right smack out of the gate, they did these cuts to Legal Services right when they were doing welfare reform. So here we are. We left overnight. We left LAF with our boxes and showed up at Rita’s at the Clearinghouse. She was in an endgame, she though they were going out of business. We needed to rent the offices to small law firms and what not. So I was sitting in the hallway like where the receptionist would normally sit with a partition around me, doing the work on welfare reform. It’s actually a good story because we were immediately by far the leading authorities about what to do with welfare reform and how to implement it in Illinois. This was ’97 now.
John Bouman:
We were resourced fabulously by CLASP and the Greenberg/ Savner [ed. note: Mark Greenberg and Steve Savner] materials on the Personal Responsibility Act. With that set of ideas we were able to figure out a bunch of stuff. We knew intimately the Illinois statute that was being amended because we’d written a lot of it over the years. But the department waited. Our session in Illinois goes from January to Memorial Day. It was well into May before they dropped the bill. They had a vehicle like an empty bill that they amended with a 350 page bill implementing the new welfare reform law. We’d already influenced it a lot but there were a lot of problems with it. There were a lot of conservative ideological things in it, and our senate and our governor were both pretty hard right Republican.
John Bouman:
So we worked over a weekend. They dropped it on like a Thursday. By Monday morning we had drafted all the amendments we needed, gotten them to the Democratic staffer who got ’em put into the correct form. So by Tuesday morning we were in the coalition meeting in Springfield and one of our legislative champions at the time was Jan Schakowsky who is a congresswoman now. She said to the group, “You know, they dropped this thing last week, I don’t know if we have time to do anything about it.” I had the lovely moment of reaching in my briefcase and putting our 350 page version on the table. And I was like, “Woo hoo.” So it was a negotiation. We won a lot of the issues. So that was the first thing we were doing.
John Bouman:
We also had a seventh circuit argument right at the time on a foster care matter involving payment for relative caregivers, foster parents who are relatives of the children. They wanted to cut those payments. We challenged that in court and were able to stop it, but that took a seventh circuit appeal. We had several other pieces of litigation like that involving the foster care system and the terrible impact on people whose problems with the kids are just because they’re poor. The child doesn’t have a bed so we’re gonna take the kid. No, get ’em a bed. Our housing people had big cases right away because this was the beginning of what’s called the Plan for Transformation which is where they tore down all the public housing in Chicago. We had several big pieces of litigation around that. But then in the early 2000s, we were the leaders, and I personally was a leader, of the campaigns to massively expand health coverage.
John Bouman:
One of the initially hidden positive things in the Personal Responsibility Act was the de-linking of Medicaid from AFDC/TANF. The Clinton Administration, Cindy Mann actually, was in charge of making sure that that was as big a change as it could possibly be. In the guidance they wrote, the regulations they wrote, this was a big opportunity to expand Medicaid as high up the economic ladder as you wanted. At the same time there was the new Children’s Health Insurance Program to cover children higher up the income scale than Medicaid did.
John Bouman:
So we were leaders in the implementation efforts in Illinois for CHIP and we launched an advocacy campaign called Family Care where we succeeded in raising the income level for Medicaid for families to 300% of poverty over a period of years. By 2004 I think we got to a place where they decided to cover every child, including undocumented kids. They’ve reeled that back in a little bit on the income side. But to this day they still cover undocumented kids. So that’s been a sustained effort of protecting their coverage.
John Bouman:
Also at the same time in ’04 and ’05 we were having a month long federal trial on what do children get when they’re covered by Medicaid? It’s a statutory requirement called “early and periodic screening diagnosis and treatment, EPSDT.” We were litigating the fact that the state was falling down on that job. That was a case that had begun in 1992 and gone to sleep during the 90s and then reactivated. I wasn’t on the case in ’92. That was a different unit at LAF. But I took it with me when we left in ’96 ’cause there was nowhere else for it to go.
John Bouman:
So I was first chair of this Medicaid case, but we had a great team on it. We won that trial. A year later we settled the relief in order to avoid an appeal and so forth. But that’s still there. That consent order last year was the vehicle we used to force the state of Illinois to make billions of dollars of Medicaid payments during the state budget impasse, in spite of the fact that there was no appropriation. They hadn’t passed a budget. Under state law you can’t spend money without an appropriation. Well, federal law still dominates. I have to wean myself from using the verb “trump”, but federal law still trumps state law. So that and another case were the post-decree vehicles for us to get those court orders. So those are some of the highlights.
Alan Houseman:
You talked a lot about what the Shriver Center clearly does and how it evolved and where it is. So I’ve got a question about what you see for the future and then I have a little more broader question. Let’s start with that one and then we’ll come to the more broader question. So what is your vision for the future of the Shriver Center?
John Bouman:
Yeah, so we have created two networks now, one’s the Legal Impact Network that I explained, the 30 some unrestricted law and policy organizations in that many states. The other is the group of graduates from our racial justice training program, now 160 lawyers I think from maybe 25 or 26 states. We’re keeping them in touch with each other, keeping them networked in terms of information and some joint activities. And we still also have a very strong position in Illinois with a multi-issue agenda and a lot of good stature and clout.
John Bouman:
So what we want to do is to deploy these networks and our communications and training tools, Clearinghouse and the training programs, to maximize impact by supporting, training, informing, linking together and networking state-focused advocacy. At times that will mature to a national position. We’re not gonna stay out of DC if there’s an opportunity. But the main focus is in the states. That’s really, we think, where a tremendous amount of the action is. Now I mean, of course it’s obviously important what happens in DC, but it doesn’t get to the kitchen table. Still dozens of decisions are made in states and localities and people in poverty have to be at those tables.
John Bouman:
So that’s what we’re doing now is we’re trying to weave together and manage effectively all these kind of entrepreneurial things we’ve done. It’s a time to bring that in and focus it and harmonize it more for bigger impact. We also have decided that we’re going to have a very conscious and aggressive race lens on the fight against poverty, not to invade anyone else’s turf, there’s plenty of work and we can be careful about all that. But the salient feature about poverty is this disparate experience. It’s two times as likely if you’re Hispanic, three times as likely if you’re African American. So at least in our problem analysis we want to apply a race lens to see what’s going on there, even if it’s an issue where nobody’s done that before.
John Bouman:
Then advocacy, if you think about it, can only add legal claims, political arguments, policy arguments, to what was already there under organic statutes or whatever. Where appropriate we’ll advocate it that way. Where it’s not appropriate we don’t have to if we don’t want to. But we want to make sure we’re doing the right thing regarding addressing the racial disparity. We’re gonna for the time being, I think, we’re gonna remain headquartered in Chicago. We’re constantly considering whether to have an office in DC. So far I think most of the work we do here is well-handled by allies and friends in DC. Once in a while when we are able to have leadership on something we can fly in and do it. So it isn’t clear yet what the value add would be for us or for the work in general to bring us into the Beltway. But we want to have a more visible national brand and presence on policy issues bringing to the table the non-Beltway voice of the work being done across widely disparate political environments in the states. That that’s a voice that should matter more. So that’s the plan for the time being. We also are just now starting on a succession plan because the clock ticks. I have no immediate plan to go, but you need a plan.
Alan Houseman:
So what do you see as the needs overall in advocacy for the future, generally? More policy advocacy, more litigation? And what is the role of civil legal aid programs in getting us there?
John Bouman:
So I’d like to see every state have this capacity. There’s 16 or so that don’t. It would be good in a network like the Legal Impact Network but also other networks, subject matter networks and so on, for every state to be there so that you could at least arguably have a chance to organize things across the whole country that way, or to have peer to peer work going on.
John Bouman:
I think we have to figure out how to — there’s a lot of people that do this well now — but in general I think we all need to figure out how to better work with community leaders. It’s easier to say than do because there’s all kinds of community leaders. But it’s important for the legitimacy of the work and its at least indirect impact on policymakers and on elections, to be honest with you. I mean, without working in elections, which we can’t do and don’t do, the work we do nevertheless is intensely political. To the extent that it’s coordinated better with leadership in the communities we serve, that kind of impact will increase. That is also a way that in my experience we exceed and we can beat the groups we’re up against, the Koch Brothers groups and others. They have plenty of them in Illinois and there’s a juggernaut of a group and they’re resourced way beyond where we are, but we beat ’em like a drum in the legislature.
John Bouman:
We’re losing to them in the newspapers and stuff because that’s where their resources are, but they have no … anchor or connection to even the communities who agree with them I think. Maybe a few kind of right wing pastors or something, but just in terms of large numbers of voters. They can get a message out and once in a while there’s an issue where doing it that way or through talk radio or whatever they can drive voters. But that’s not really something that can build a roll call in a legislature. So I think all of us need to get better at that. We teach a course on it called “Community Lawyering.” There are people around the country who are very good at it, figured it out, know how to do it.
John Bouman:
But there were long stretches of my career where I had a client or a handful of clients and sat in my office and wrote briefs. We got things done but it wasn’t as impactful as it could have been. So that’s something. I think we have to be better and more effective participants in the big argument in American life. That this is an argument that we have to be players in. It’s not bigger than us. That’s this argument around the role of government, why we pay taxes, why it’s important to people who aren’t poor that the Government does stuff about people who are.
John Bouman:
I’ve started a communications department. It’s still small. But the idea ultimately, hopefully, is to just take that on more. We’ve defaulted on that. Once again we can win the smaller fights here and there. But this big argument about that, which you’re seeing play out in a Roy Moore race now and so on, we just haven’t articulated and we haven’t been consistent about and we haven’t shown up on it.
Alan Houseman:
You’re on a number of local and national boards. Describe the boards you’re on.
John Bouman:
Right now I’m just on two. But I recently was on some others I’ll mention. But I’m on the Center on Law and Social Policy board that you asked me to join, I’m not even sure how long ago now, 15 years, 18, something like that?
Alan Houseman:
Yeah.
John Bouman:
And then I’m on a board in Illinois of something called Illinois Partners for Human Service. I helped create that. It’s the statewide organization of human service providers. There’s 800 of them in the group now. They’re the people who implement the stuff we win in the legislature. They do the direct service, the social work, and that kind of stuff. They get screwed in the budget conversation every year. The contractual relationship with the state is just sick. They get taken advantage of, treated like dirt. They just had to organize their power, which is considerable if they join together and stay focused. So I’m on that board. Recently I was on the Chicago Transit Authority board, appointed by Governor Quinn. I had to step down from that when the state adopted a law that you couldn’t be a registered lobbyist and sit on a paid board. It was nice to be on a paid board, actually. And, some years ago, I was the president of my church during its centennial which was a challenge.
Alan Houseman:
And your church is?
John Bouman:
It’s Grace Lutheran Church where my dad taught and was the organist and choir master and where I went to school. I still go there. I told you I had no imagination about moving away. I was on an advisory committee to the census on minority populations and how to effectively count them. I stepped down from that about a year ago. So, that’s a handful.
Alan Houseman:
You received a number of awards which we have and will be in the record. Which of those awards mean the most to you?
John Bouman:
I really value the Kutak-Dodds Award, which is the NLADA award. That’s your peer group right? That matters an immense amount. Do you have the list of awards there? I can look at them. I’m blanking on it now. I’ve gotten several awards from organizations for particular pieces of work, and that’s always rewarding and it means a ton. I try to do things like that for my staff because, if they’re anything like me, that kind of recognition and approval stands in for the money you didn’t make. It’s part of what makes the work worth it. Yeah so these, the rest of these are all like that. They were awarded for particular success in the litigation. The most recent one from the American Constitution Society, they call it Legal Legends Award, that was fun to get just because of the name of it, the Legal Legends Award. I have a lot of respect for that organization so that was a nice recognition.
Alan Houseman:
So finally is there anything you want to add to this, any comments you want to make, anything we haven’t covered that we should have?
John Bouman:
Maybe other people have said this, and we shouldn’t forget to say it. It’s such a joy to work in this field because of the colleagues and friends you make. In the Shriver Center there was a core group of people who left LAF to join up with me there, and a bunch of people at the Clearinghouse. Everybody made a bet on it. A lot of us had small children, no safety net. But you have these brothers and sisters who do this work and that’s part of what makes it fun and interesting and successful and rewarding, and that’s one of the great reasons to come to the NLADA conference, just to hang out with these folks, which I always get a lot of enjoyment and fun from, as well as usually a pocket full of really good ideas.
Alan Houseman:
Great. Well thank you John.
John Bouman:
You bet, thank you.
END