First full-time Executive Director of Management Information Exchange (MIE) starting in 1997. Previously Executive Director of Legal Services for Cape Cod and Islands, and attorney for Legal Services of Eastern Michigan.
Oral history details
| Storyteller: | Patricia Pap |
|---|---|
| Interviewer: | Houseman, Alan |
| Date of interview: | May 12, 2016 |
| Where relates to: | Massachusetts and Michigan |
| Topics: | Civil legal aid: Funding, Civil legal aid: General, LSC: Restrictions, Mergers, Nonprofit management, and Training |
| Law type: | Civil |
| Collection: | CNEJL |
| Length: | 0:46:26 |
Full text of transcript
Download PDF: TranscriptConsortium for the National Equal Justice Library
Oral History Collection
Interview with Patricia Pap
Conducted by Alan Houseman
May 12, 2016
Alan Houseman:
This is an oral history of Patricia Pap, whom we’ll call Patty. She is the Executive Director of the Management Information Exchange. The interviewer is Alan Houseman for the National Justice Library. The date is May 12th, 2016 at the Palmer House in Chicago, Illinois at the Equal Justice Conference.
Alan Houseman:
Patty, let’s begin with your background, where you grew up, where you went to college and law school, and a brief overview of your professional legal work history. Then we’ll come back and explore it in much more depth.
Patricia Pap:
Great. I’m a native of Ohio. I was born in Cleveland and moved out to a suburb of Cleveland with my family when I was quite small. I stayed there through high school.
Alan Houseman:
What suburb?
Patricia Pap:
Solon. I left Solon to go to Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts. I returned to Cleveland at the end of college, worked for a couple of years and then enrolled in law school at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. My first legal aid job was in Michigan, for Legal Services of Eastern Michigan at their main office in Flint. I worked in Midland and then in Saginaw. After a few years I moved back to Massachusetts to become Executive Director of Legal Services for Cape Cod and the Islands. I did that for about 15 years and then joined Management Information Exchange as its first full-time Executive Director. That’s basically my story.
Alan Houseman:
What motivated you to go into legal aid work, what factors, or people, or influence?.
Patricia Pap:
Well, I’m a child of the 60s, so the years that I was at Mount Holyoke were 1969 to 1973. It was a time of huge turmoil, a lot of political activism. A tough time to be in college in a lot of ways and a wonderful time to be growing up at the same time. I absorbed a rebellious spirit I think as part of that experience after growing up in a very traditional way in my hometown of Solon. When I returned home I entered a factory. I worked at a couple of different factories for the few years that I was home between college and law school. I was a punch press operator and I worked in a clothing factory for a while, and traveled around the country in a beat up car with some friends.
Patricia Pap:
Then I decided to go to law school at some point thinking I was going to be a lawyer for a union, or a union organizer, or something like that. During the time that I was in law school I had an opportunity to work in a clinic and felt the benefits and the enjoyment of working for somebody who needed legal representation on a personal level. It was a criminal defense clinic, so nothing like what I’m doing now. But still it inspired me to continue or to think more seriously about that than I had. I liked the courtroom also. Then I met Ed Hoort. I’m sure you remember Ed Hoort. He was the executive director of Legal Services of Eastern Michigan at the time. He came down to recruit at Case Western Reserve and spoke with such passion about legal aid and his organization that I applied for a job and was hired.
Alan Houseman:
You worked for Legal Services of Eastern Michigan in a couple of different cities. What were some of your achievements or most interesting experiences of that work?
Patricia Pap:
I joined legal aid at the time of the expansion, so it was 1981. The organization had just opened up a couple of offices in rural areas that hadn’t been served by an office located physically there before. One really interesting thing was being among the first legal aid lawyers — there were three of us in the office — in these rural counties of Michigan. People were really astounded by the idea that low income people should have lawyers, and hostile to that idea. People really enjoyed hazing all of us who were part of this new wave. Also, my being a woman and practicing law in these rural areas was unusual for them. Two of the three of us in this office were women, but it wasn’t at all typical. In fact, I’m trying to think now whether there were any other women that I met when I worked in Midland who were lawyers and I’m not sure that there were. That was one really interesting experience.
Patricia Pap:
I had been a community organizer in law school. I worked during the time that I was at Case in Cleveland Heights in the inner ring suburb of Cleveland where housing discrimination was a huge issue. There was a lot of activism. My organization was Heights Community Congress. We were supported by the Cleveland Foundation and other funders. I developed a belief in the power of people and the importance of people determining their destiny and fighting for their destiny. I carried that with me to Eastern Michigan. I can remember being involved in organizing trailer parks, which were a big part of the housing stock there, and working within Section 8 housing development. Similarly I educated the tenants about their rights and encouraged them, and supported them as they developed their own agenda and made their needs and their demands known to the landlords and other powers that be.
Patricia Pap:
It seems like a long time ago, but the Legal Services Corporation actually supported that kind of training and activism way back when. I met David Beckwith and Will Collette and attended a number of their multi-forum advocacy trainings. I actually trained with them in a couple places around the country once I was trained myself in their technique. That’s a highlight that I’ve never lost, just that belief in people and empowerment.
Alan Houseman:
What led you to go to Cape Cod and that program?
Patricia Pap:
In Eastern Michigan, first I was a staff attorney specializing in housing law and doing rural work, Farmer’s Home, trailer parks, and rural Section 8. Then I went to Saginaw and continued to do housing work and also was the supervising attorney of that office. It was now about 1979 or 1980 and it was the height of the depression in the auto industry. The saddest thing that I’ve ever experienced were the number of families who came into the office who had once led a middle class existence. They had the house that they owned, the couple of cars that they owned, maybe a boat in the yard that they motored around with in Lake Huron, and they were losing all of that. They had been laid off. Everything was gone. There was nothing that could be done at that point. There was nothing I knew to be done, there was no legal handle that I could figure out or that we knew about how to stop a foreclosure when the mortgage wasn’t paid. It was a little bit different in that respect than maybe the current housing crisis or the most recent housing crisis where scams and other inappropriate transactions gave rise for at least some people to seek some remedies. There were no remedies.
Patricia Pap:
That really wore me down after a while. It was just very hard. Michigan felt conservative to me compared to what I learned in Massachusetts and where I wanted to be. I was looking for jobs. I pulled out my atlas and figured out where I wanted to live. That’s how I wound up at Cape Cod and the Islands. So it was an executive director job there that I applied for and was offered.
Alan Houseman:
Tell me a little bit about Cape Cod and the Islands program and some of the interesting accomplishments and interesting things you did there.
Patricia Pap:
That program, Legal Services for Cape Cod and the Islands, doesn’t exist anymore. It’s been involved in a couple of mergers and now serves all of southeastern Massachusetts under the name of South Coastal Counties Legal Services. At the time it served all of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the eastern half of Plymouth County. A couple of things were significant about it when I moved there. One was that Massachusetts was in a real economic boom and almost all of our clients were working, as well as receiving public benefits. They were leading a far better existence than anybody I ever met in Michigan. That was good for them and a bit of a relief. The poverty there is invisible. All those places are known for their wealth. People that I met from outside of those communities needed to remember that the people who served, the people who had the wealth were our clients and people who were poor. Housing and homelessness was a major issue there, and remains to this day to be an issue. Those are the primary things that I recall.
Patricia Pap:
It was a time of transition in legal aid, I think. What I mean by that is that legal aid at that point was approaching 20 years old. While I was at Legal Services for Cape Cod and the Islands we celebrated both its 20th and its 25th anniversary, so we were becoming part of the fabric of the community. That felt appropriate. People who worked in the organization and who were vested in the communities were being treated like members of the communities, which was a different experience than it had been when I started in legal aid.
Alan Houseman:
At one point you had a dispute with the Legal Services Corporation over a building, which I know about because I helped you a little bit. Describe it just to get a little feel for, A, what you were trying to do, it was a creative thing, and B, what the LSC’s problems were with this.
Patricia Pap:
It was 1984, 1985, 1986, shortly after I moved to the Cape. We wound up becoming closely connected with a number of other human service agencies. The real estate market was taking off. The height of the market was probably 1989. We felt like we had to do something in order to protect our ability to afford our office space there. My colleagues in human services felt likewise. So we devised an idea of purchasing a building together using a 501c4, I think, real estate holding company, and then renting to each of us. The Legal Services Corporation didn’t like that but we didn’t own the building. We rented from the holding company that owned the building. It stabilized us. We had a government tenant for a long time that bore the major burden of the rent.
Patricia Pap:
Let’s see, this is one of the ups and downs of the Legal Services Corporation in terms of how activist they are in regulating and going after legal services organizations that they thought were not fully compliant with the regs. We had a questioned cost of something over $80,000 or $90,000 for this building. You were a big help for us and we were very successfully able to prove that everything that we had spent was spent correctly. We wound up with no questioned costs at all. But we spent a lot of time and energy in fighting that particular charge. The building is still there and South Coastal Counties Legal Services still has one of its branch offices in that building. The Housing Assistance Corporation and the mental health agency that were all part of it are still there too. So it did what it needed to do in terms of stabilizing us.
Alan Houseman:
After being on Cape Cod you next went to the Management Information Exchange. Why did you do that? We’re going to talk a lot about MIE.
Patricia Pap:
Okay. I was at LSCCI for about 15 years and left in 1997. In the years immediately preceding that a number of things were happening. One was a big reduction in funding from the Legal Services Corporation and increased regulation from the Legal Services Corporation about what legal aid organizations across the country were able to do. That was a very difficult time. Over the years, with inflation and other pressures, to me it started to feel like we were too small to stay independent. We were about a million dollar organization at that point. We’d been higher but then with the funding cutbacks and despite our private fundraising efforts, we were probably just at a million. We were exploring mergers with co-legal aid organizations in southeastern Massachusetts and couldn’t make it work. It was really hard to run an organization that was so under-resourced.
Patricia Pap:
At the same time, I think part of the pressured feeling of that financial situation was that we were a unionized program, we had been the entire time. The union was pretty active at that point. It felt to me like relationships with my colleagues weren’t productive at moments. They made me unhappy. The biggest thing was that I felt like we couldn’t do what we were trying to do for clients because we just didn’t have depth. We might have had one person doing welfare law, one person doing housing law, et cetera, covering a pretty big geographic area. At that point, I had been on the board of Management Information Exchange for awhile. I participated in the journal committee for a number of years while I was Executive Director on the Cape. The MIE board had a vision that with increased staff capacity we could do more of the work that we believed in as an organization. They decided to hire their first full-time executive director and I decided to apply. I didn’t want to leave the legal aid community. It was my home and calling. So I decided to try it from a different perspective. That was about 17 years ago I think.
Alan Houseman:
Right. Explain a little bit about what the Management Information Exchange, or what we call MIE, does, and how did it come into existence?
Patricia Pap:
What is does now, what our mission is right now, is that excellence in management means excellent client services. We’re dedicated to supporting managers throughout the country of all kinds of legal aid programs. We do training for executive directors and supervisors, and managing attorneys, and fundraisers, and administrators, and fiscal officers. We’ve gradually expanded the groups that we provide training and consulting with. I think the board was right that some additional staff capacity would go a long way. We publish a journal, we do consulting. We now do executive direction search. We have a website and a resource library that collects the best practices from all over the country and puts them up there so that other managers can view them and not have to reinvent the wheel.
Patricia Pap:
The beginning of it was very different. I wasn’t there at the beginning. It was a little bit before my involvement. I think a group of maybe a half dozen legal services executive directors got together at one national conference because they were all running unionized organizations and didn’t know how to do it right. They didn’t know how to be effective in that kind of a context with respect to their relationship with the union. So people got together, they met once, then they met six months later at the next conference. Then they decided it would be worthwhile to be an ongoing organization.
Patricia Pap:
Somewhere around 1981, I think, the first issue of the Management Information Exchange Journal was born with a headline “Project Directors Form MIE”. MIE had a reputation at the beginning of being an anti-union organization. I don’t think it ever really was anti-union, but it was a recognition that directors needed to support themselves. It had some great characters involved in that. Sheldon Roodman from Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago, now LAF, was one of those people. Toby Rothschild, formerly of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles was one. Victor Geminiani was one, and I’m not exactly sure what organization Victor was with at the time of the founding-
Alan Houseman:
LSC.
Patricia Pap:
He was with LSC at that point?
Alan Houseman:
Yeah.
Patricia Pap:
Okay, so he might not have been part of MIE at the very beginning. But-
Alan Houseman:
No, no, he was there.
Patricia Pap:
He was there. That’s how it started. It was the idea that we would help each other tackle the challenges that we faced. To do this day, that’s a core part of our identity, being based in the field, led by people in the field. Our board, all of our committees, our activity planning — it’s all done by legal services people who are actively engaged in running organizations or involved in the practice.
Alan Houseman:
After the 1996 restrictions were put into place, what did MIE do to respond to them?
Patricia Pap:
I think what we did was we called up CLASP and we talked to you, and we talked to Linda Perle, and put on a number of trainings over the years. We told people about the restrictions, provided checklists, provided advice from their colleagues, and words of caution and words of encouragement to push the envelope, to remember that we were lawyers and should represent our organizations in doing what we were formed to do, and not be so worried about things that we shouldn’t be worried about. Thank you for that, that’s a really important part-
Alan Houseman:
… on the record, was anyone else doing those things, those trainings?
Patricia Pap:
I don’t think so.
Alan Houseman:
MIE essentially went out to all the legal services organizations and essentially put on the trainings that the project directors and the key staff needed to understand the new restrictions.
Patricia Pap:
Yes. That’s right.
Alan Houseman:
You mentioned this earlier, but I just want to talk through some of the other key things you do. Describe the new director training you do and the supervising attorney training.
Patricia Pap:
The training for new executive directors was the first ongoing training or regularly scheduled training we did over these regulations. By the way, I still have the binders from the regulations trainings dating way back then. MIE will never give them. We started to do new executive director training to orient new directors to all of the roles that they needed to assume as directors with a particular eye toward developing a vision and a leadership style, and the understanding that they were more than administrators.
Patricia Pap:
John Arango worked with MIE throughout. He’s at least semi-retired right now. Within the last year and a half, he stopped doing new executor director training with us. He had been an integral part of that training from the very beginning and has developed the curriculum that we still use now. It’s a two-day training of new directors of LSC-funded, non-LSC-funded, and other legal aid kinds of organizations. It walks people through their role and encourages them to develop a vision and lead their organization in a way to meet that vision and their mission.
Alan Houseman:
That’s done twice a year in two big conferences, correct?
Patricia Pap:
Yes. That’s right.
Alan Houseman:
You’ve also done, I know, training called supervising attorney training, I’m not sure that’s what you call it now, but something like that. What is that and how often do you do that?
Patricia Pap:
I should say, as you pointed out before, there is nobody else who’s training new executive directors but MIE, this group of volunteers and small staff. Supervising legal work training is what we call it. At one point the Legal Services Corporation was doing some supervision training, they called it PAWS. I don’t remember what PAWS means, but there was PAWS 1 and PAWS 2. Then when the restrictions happened around ’95 the training unit was disbanded and for a couple years nobody was doing supervising legal work training. Members of the MIE board, particularly Mary Asbury at that point, and others-
Alan Houseman:
Who is she?
Patricia Pap:
She’s the Executive Director of the Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati. She was then and still is on the MIE board and a hugely important leader for MIE. She and some others got together and decided that it was important to bring back supervision training. The first supervision training that MIE did happened just as I came on board. At that point, we were still asking people who attended the training if supervision a real job. I feel very proud of the fact that we’ve totally changed the culture in legal aid. Nobody would ever question whether supervision was a real job now. We recognize how hard it is. We did supervision training twice a year for maybe about 10 years. We do it a little less regularly now, maybe only once a year. But we’re still doing it.
Alan Houseman:
Right. You do some work on fundraising. You also periodically bring executive directors together to talk about common problems. Explain some of these other-
Patricia Pap:
Okay. Well the fundraising project of MIE once was a freestanding fundraising project. It was formed in Atlanta where MIE I think had its first, well maybe its second, headquarters. The fundraising project was led by Steve Gottlieb, Meredith McBurney, Jack Ward and some others. They soon received a grant from the Ford Foundation to give them a little bit of staffing that was provided by Shelley [last name unintelligible] working out of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society. At that early date they were helping people learn how to apply for United Way funding and some other basic foundation funding that soon progressed into law firm campaigns. Those folks really had a vision that we could not rely on federal government funding if we were going to stabilize and grow our organizations. I think their first effort to branch out had to do with the natural constituency of law firms and individual lawyers supporting legal aid.
Patricia Pap:
At end of the 1990s, MIE and the fundraising project merged. MIE took over the annual fundraising conference and the provision of individual fundraising consulting to legal aid organizations. That work continues today. We still do the individual counseling and we do an annual conference. We don’t need to teach people how to do foundation fundraising anymore, which is wonderful. We’re doing private fundraising with law firms, with individual donors, with major donors, and a much more sophisticated approach to fundraising. We’ve published some articles. The only place that there’s been growth in legal aid fundraising from the very beginning to now as in private fundraising. I think if you look at the Legal Services Corporation, even in absolute dollars, the funding we get from Congress is no greater than it was back when Hilary Clinton was president of the LSC board. All of the growth that we’ve achieved has come from private fundraising efforts and from alliances with partners.
Alan Houseman:
The executive director meetings occur about once every year, at least periodically.
Patricia Pap:
Yeah, we do those every other year. Here in Chicago we do a training for experienced executive directors, not solely for them but it’s a training that brings together 50, 60, or 70 executive directors at a time, usually focused on a particular issue. The idea is that over the course of two days the directors will have an opportunity to reflect, in a more quiet setting than is possible at a big national conference, on some topic that’s important. We always do employment law, that’s a bedrock of what MIE teaches. But we have other topics as well. We have done a lot on budgeting in times of economic stress and how to right size an organization, and how to appreciate our core. We’ve talked about stabilizing staffing, stabilizing funding. We’ve talked about partnerships, joining together with our fundraisers and with our administrative staff in partnerships. Those are a few of the topics that we’ve dealt with.
Alan Houseman:
Are there other training events that you do besides those we’ve talked about?
Patricia Pap:
This is another Victor Geminiani innovation. He realized that the group of administrative staff members were not receiving any training at all and weren’t having any opportunity to meet with their colleagues on a national level and truly feel part of the mission. These administrators are the people who do our technology, who do our HR, who do our office management, who do our fiscal stuff. Victor encouraged us to start a conference for legal services administrators. He led that effort for awhile and now others lead the effort. Every 18 months we bring together legal services administrators from around the country to share their stories and their knowledge. We have joined in partnership with the Legal Services Technology Initiative Grant folks every three years to bring those groups together, but then we also meet separately as administrators.
Patricia Pap:
We started to realize over the last maybe five years or so that more of the people who are coming to the training were coming because of the financial training that we were offering at the administrator’s conference and the compliance training that we were offering. We decided that we were going to have another breakout group of finance officers. This September we’re going to be pioneering our financial essentials training. It will cover in depth over two days everything that CFOs, executive directors, staff accountants and board members need to know about a legal services organization’s finances. It’s focused not on the LSC but on best practices in the financial arena — reserves, budgeting, allocations, and all of those related issues. Then I guess we’re coming back to our roots, in a sense, because on the third day of the conference we’re going to do an LSC compliance training as it relates to finances.
Alan Houseman:
Great. You mentioned early on MIE Journal, which continues to come out. So describe a little bit about what it is and what you’re trying to achieve with it.
Patricia Pap:
Right, so it comes out quarterly. It has 56 pages. Typically, within each journal we have a number of interesting articles that come to us. We have some regular features and then we have special features where we try to focus in on a particular topic that we think would be of interest to legal services managers. The idea behind the journal is that it is written by legal services managers for legal services managers. It is intended to be a practical journal with a bit of a management focus. MIE has never tried to do substantive training, we don’t teach housing law, or benefits law. Everything we do has some management focus. It may be priority setting and learning about cutting edge issues in those areas. The journal, as I said, is written by people who work for legal aid organizations that are allies and is intended to move us forward as a community on management and cutting edge and client-related topics.
Alan Houseman:
Just for the record, how many people work at MIE?
Patricia Pap:
We have one full-time executive director.
Alan Houseman:
That would be you.
Patricia Pap:
Me. I have an associate who works about half-time. We have a resource development consultant who works about a third time for us, primarily planning the fundraising conference and providing individual assistance to programs who need consulting help. Then we have a few people who pitch in from time to time on training projects, or social media, or things like that.
Alan Houseman:
How would you assess the importance and impact of MIE in the legal aid community?
Patricia Pap:
Well, I’m biased.
Alan Houseman:
Of course.
Patricia Pap:
I love the people that I work with on the board who are visionaries. I mentioned some things that I don’t think would have happened without MIE — regulation training and pushing back a bit on LSC regulations supervision. It’s a real job, and we’re getting pretty good at it. Fundraising is dramatic. The resources that we’ve brought into legal aid by providing some staff support that volunteers in the field needed in order to move their efforts forward. The financial training, management training, the journal. The journal has continued now for more than 35 years. Last year was our 35th anniversary. I think it’s pretty special what we as a group of volunteers and people in the field have accomplished. There’s no smarter group of people than the people who run legal aid organizations, who care about the mission serving low-income clients. You get them together in a room and anything’s possible.
Alan Houseman:
What’s your future view for civil legal aid, your vision for legal aid? As you think about the future what would you like to see civil legal aid be?
Patricia Pap:
I’ve been thinking a lot about that since I knew that you were going to ask me that question and since I got this special invitation to talk about MIE and my work. I think there are moments in time when legal aid is at a crossroads. People might call it disruption or just major turning points or dramatic changes that we didn’t necessarily see coming upon us. At the time that I was with the Cape I think one of those dramatic changes had to do with the recognition of the number of clients who didn’t have attorneys. This would have been back in the late 80s and up to the mid-90s. Also the importance of family law, which most legal aid organizations probably were not doing at that point, at least not LSC-funded ones.
Patricia Pap:
Now we’ve got this disruption of technology happening. I don’t think I know where it’s leading. I feel optimistic about the tools that we are getting and I also feel worried about what’s happening. The optimism of course has to do with being efficient and effective, and putting more tools out there for our staff members and also our clients who can take advantage of the training and information we can offer them. But the worry has to do with some of the emphasis on self-represented or unrepresented litigants at the expense of core services for representation to low-income clients. Some of the studies that I’ve seen — I don’t think there are many good ones right now, or enough good ones — point to the fact that without a lawyer, in the courtroom for sure and probably in administrative forums and in other places, a poor person is just not going to be able to achieve what they want to achieve. They’re not going to be able to effectively enforce their rights.
Patricia Pap:
I worry that we’re neglecting those core programs. I worry that people coming into legal aid right now are coming at a time when the technology is preeminent and they may not know the history of legal aid. They may not know from whence we came. I’m so grateful for the fact that we have your histories and Earl Johnson’s. But who is reading those right now? They might not understand our roots. I feel like it’s essential that we find a way to teach everybody within our organizations the roots, where we came from, to put perspective on where we are and where we’re headed.
Alan Houseman:
First are there any things we left out that you want to talk about or put on the record? Finally, are there any other reflections that you’re like to make about civil legal aid, or your work at MIE, or whatever?
Patricia Pap:
I think we’ve covered a lot. On this question that we’re just talking about, I hope that the people who have served us well as big picture thinkers over the years will continue to think and write about the future of legal aid, and opine about where we ought to be heading, and how to interpret what’s going on around us. I just think it’s essential. Too often, leaders of organizations have so much to deal with on a day to day basis. It’s hard to step back and think about the future, much less put those thoughts to paper. I’m aware that many of my colleagues are approaching the time that they’re thinking about retiring. We want to lose their future contributions to this community.
Alan Houseman:
Okay.
Patricia Pap:
I guess this is a way that we’re making sure that doesn’t happen, so thank you. I’m looking forward to being able to hear all of the oral histories that you’re collecting. It’s so essential. It’s so essential. Thinking about the futurists and the visionaries reminds me that we always talk about getting you to write something else for us Alan, for the journal, and I hope you’ll have some time to do that before too long.
Alan Houseman:
Great. Well thanks.
Patricia Pap:
Thank you.
END