Discusses growing up in poverty, how she went to law school, and how she led NLSLA in medical-legal partnerships, foreclosure prevention, and COVID.
Oral history details
| Storyteller: | Yvonne Mariajimenez |
|---|---|
| Interviewer: | Houseman, Alan |
| Date of interview: | Oct 1, 2024 |
| Where relates to: | California |
| Topics: | Foreclosures, Landlord-tenant, Medical-legal partnerships, and Mortage fraud |
| Law type: | Civil |
| Collection: | CNEJL |
| Georgetown Law Library link (possible video): | |
| Length: | 0:49:09 |
Full text of transcript
Download PDF: TranscriptConsortium for the National Equal Justice Library
Oral history collection interview with Yvonne Mariajimenez
Conducted by Alan Houseman
October 1, 2024
Alan Houseman:
This is an oral history of Yvonne Mariajimenez, who is the President & CEO of Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County (NLSLA). The date is October 1st, 2024. We’re doing this through Zoom. So Yvonne, let’s begin with you very briefly describing essentially your life history, your education, professional career, where you grew up, schooling, et cetera. Then we’ll come back and ask specific questions.
Yvonne Mariajimenez:
I was born and raised in East Los Angeles, California, an impoverished community in Southern California. I grew up in the neighborhoods that we serve. I grew up in poverty. My mother was a single head of household with three kids. The best decision she made was going to the local church and talking to the nuns and saying, “I will cook, clean, do whatever you need in exchange for my daughters to go to the Catholic church school tuition free.” The nun said yes. So from first to eighth grade, we were educated in a church, which will become important because it was the institution that gave us stability. My teachers were our authority figures and later were our friends, mentors, counselors. I continued in a Catholic girls high school. My sister and I went to work so we could pay our own tuition through high school.
I did not think I could go to college. We were poor, had no money. It was because of my teachers and the interest they took in me and my sister, and the potential that they saw, that they pushed us to pursue higher education and assisted us in that endeavor. I received a free ride to USC and I completed my undergraduate degree at USC.
I was a junior at USC when I met a law professor. Up until that time I did not know any lawyers whatsoever, let alone a woman attorney. She was establishing the paralegal program for USC Law School and she said, “Take my classes.” I did and I graduated in 1978 with a Bachelor’s and a paralegal certification. She said, “You should go to law school.” I said, “I don’t have any money. I need to go to work.” She said, “Well, I have some friends who are hiring. Let me introduce you. Send your resume immediately, because they’re doing interviews now.”
She introduced me to legal aid. The organization was located in the San Fernando Valley. In my mind, the Valley was suburbia, middle class neighborhoods. I lived in East LA, which is probably a 25 mile drive one way. The interview was on a Monday. I drove out Sunday to make sure I knew where I was going, and I discovered Pacoima, California, an impoverished community in the northeast San Fernando Valley, which I never imagined existed. It reminded me of East LA. I got the job offer for a paralegal position. I am fluent in Spanish so they hired me as a paralegal interpreter. I did that for four years. I knew the cases very well and developed great rapport with clients.
I remember being in court at a trial and thinking, I can do this. I’m going to go to law school. I went on to law school to be a legal aid lawyer. That was the whole point of going to law school. I worked with legal aid throughout law school and it kept me grounded as to why I was going to law school in the first place. I did return to legal aid. I was hired as a Reggie fellow — I think I was in the second to last cohort of Reggies — for a two-year fellowship. When that concluded, I applied for a staff attorney position. I got that and came up the ranks — supervising attorney, managing attorney, later deputy director. I served as deputy director for 21 years. I was appointed CEO in September of 2019. I’ve been with this organization for 46 years.
Alan Houseman:
Okay, great. I think you answered this, but just to pin it down, I ask everybody this. So why did you go into legal services?
Yvonne Mariajimenez:
I came from the communities that we serve. I came from poverty. As a teenager, I volunteered a great deal with teachers and in my community, so I had a real passion to work with people. When I was exposed to legal aid, I knew this is the work I wanted to do. I did do a couple of stints in Century City in a private law firm. They paid very well. But I never felt satisfied. I knew that in legal aid I would make a difference and if I didn’t work in legal aid, the people that needed free legal services would go without. So it really convinced me this was my career, this is my passion. I feel it’s been my vocation. It’s not a job, it’s a vocation.
Alan Houseman:
Okay. Let’s turn to your work with Neighborhood Legal Services. First of all, describe the program a bit just because there may be some confusion between you and other legal aid programs in the Los Angeles area.
Yvonne Mariajimenez:
Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County has a budget of about $35 million. We have a staff of 200, approximately 85 attorneys. It’s a multi-office program. We have four offices in our service area. When I started in this program, we were a one office program. We had 21 lawyers, a staff of about 40 people. When I took over Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County in September of 2019, we had a budget of $17 million and a staff of about 135 people. We have grown significantly the last four and a half, five years.
Alan Houseman:
So you started out as a staff attorney, then managing attorney and supervising attorney. Describe a little bit of the work you did there, your litigation, your housing unit, and policy advocacy.
Yvonne Mariajimenez:
When I started in this organization, we were a generalist program. Everybody did everything. Around 1980 the program turned to specialization and we chose the work groups we wanted to work in. I chose housing, so obviously I did a lot of work around landlord-tenant, eviction prevention. At the time though, we also did a lot of work around equity fraud. I did several quiet title actions. Poor people’s only asset typically is their home. There were a lot of schemes at the time trying to defraud poor homeowners of their equity through water filter schemes and all kinds of renovation work. I also represented elderly homeowners who were being defrauded of their homes and title taken to their properties. So that’s the kind of work I did. I became an expert in public and subsidized housing at a time where the private sector didn’t have a whole lot of expertise in that area. So that time was pretty exciting. David Pallack, NLSLA Senior Counsel, was one of the significant contributors to Good Cause eviction. Today we have many more protections for tenants that didn’t exist when I was a young practicing housing lawyer.
Alan Houseman:
Right. Describe your work as deputy director and particularly the Medical Legal Community Partnership. You talked in your resume about prevention strategy and the foreclosure crisis and the homeowners Bill of Rights, but I want to get the medical legal partnership in because I don’t think I’ve anybody describe it so far.
Yvonne Mariajimenez:
Let me preface this by saying that this organization, in the mid-nineties, began working with organizing institutions. We are funded by the Legal Services Corporation. We cannot organize. What we can do is teach, we educate. We teach individuals their rights and how to exercise them. We collaborate with an organizing arm in Los Angeles County, and that’s important for what I’m going to say. The work we have done — around healthcare, meaningful access to healthcare, the stemming the tide of foreclosures during the foreclosure crisis, that we’ll get to, keeping emergency rooms open — was all done in collaboration with an organizing arm, the Industrial Areas Foundation known here in LA as One LA. It is the organizing arm we work with. We do not organize, but we teach, we train. That is what we do. It is in collaboration with that organizing arm that we have done some of the most effective work ever, including policy advocacy. So I’ll park that there.
Barbara Siegel was a managing attorney in this program. She was hired when we established the Health Consumer Center (HCC) of Los Angeles. A consortium was created of seven to eight legal aids throughout California. That made up the Health Consumer Alliance. NLSLA lead the largest project in Los Angeles. Barbara Siegel implemented that project and began growing it in 1998.. She went to Boston to see firsthand a concept that had been floated to her called Medical-Legal Partnerships, and she observed this project in Boston where that concept was born. She then brought it to Los Angeles and we established the first Medical Legal Community Partnership. We call them Medical Legal Community Partnerships (MLCP) because community is a key critical and essential component of that concept.
She established it at St. John’s Child and Family Center in South Los Angeles. South Los Angeles is another impoverished area in Los Angeles County. At one time it was predominantly Black. Today it’s probably predominantly Latino. East Los Angeles was predominantly Latino and continues to be. Anyway, those are the two areas in LA County.
Barbara established that first Medical Legal Community Partnership. We were funded by the California Endowment, and she began to grow those partnerships in LA County with medical providers. Many of these were clinics. There weren’t County clinics. They were independent clinics that made up a clinic association. So she started that concept and she built it over time.
When we were celebrating HCC’s anniversary, I think the fifth or tenth anniversary of having established HCC, we had a seminar. We invited Dr. Robert Ross. He headed the California Endowment up until this year and is well-known for the work that he’s done. He spoke about being an emergency room doctor at a time when crack babies were being born in huge numbers, and he said he could treat the mothers and he could treat the babies. But what he was really concerned about was, why is this happening? So he then got into policy advocacy to deal with the upstream issues.
Barbara Siegel’s father was in the audience listening to all this and listening to this medical legal community partnership concept. Her father said, “I’m going to give you a donation and you’re going to seed a class. You need to teach this concept in the medical schools and in the law schools before these students graduate so that they know this way of working together, of bringing health providers and legal aid attorneys together to effect the social determinants of health.” And he provided a donation that started that class at USC. Barbara negotiated with USC Law School and Medical School and created the Medical Legal Community Partnership didactic and practicum class at USC. Barbara has been teaching that class for over 20 years.
Barbara Siegel started that entire effort. She retired, I think around 2010. There was no one to take over the Medical Legal Community Partnership project. So I told her I would like to do it. I felt the project was very effective. My vision was to see this concept embedded into the LA County health delivery system. I believed we could achieve that. So I took that on.
In 2010, Dr. Mitch Katz, who was overseeing all of LA County Health System (and now does it for the state of New York) came to Los Angeles. I met with him. Also, at that time, LA County had signed up for early enrollment on expansion of Medicaid, and our program wanted to be very much a part of this effort. I went to Dr. Katz, I said, “I want to be working with you, collaborating with you to enroll people into expanded healthcare, Medicaid, and all the health plans in California.” We collaborated on that. The organizing entity that we work and which works through institutions, churches, faith-based institutions, school centers, schools, nonprofits,brought together individuals to train and teach on the health plans. Our attorneys did all the training of these individuals and we collaborated with LA County on enrolling people directly into the LA County Health System and into Medicaid. We had a real high accuracy rate, and in 16 months we enrolled over 7,000 or 8,000 people into medical homes with health care plans. Dr. Katz stated it was the most effective grass roots effort he had ever witnessed. We did that effort the Medical Legal Community Partnership project.
It was through working with the community and nurturing that relationship with Dr. Katz that I said, “I need your support on the endorsement of medical-legal community partnerships. I need to raise money to support the project.” And he said, “Absolutely. I think it’s an extremely effective program.” And he said, “Yvonne, it’s not out of the question that you be a line item in my budget.” And so I said, “What do I need to do to do that?” And he said, “Reduce the number of emergency room visits at my LA County hospitals.” That was a tall order. But we did such a great job enrolling into expanded Medicaid and health plans in California. It was a beginning. Dr. Katz left Los Angeles, I believe in 2017, but he first said, “write up a request for proposal for a medical legal community partnership.” And we did and gave it to him. Then he said, “Okay, I’m going to float this out.” And they did. We bid for it. And he said, “Okay, here you go. You’ve been awarded the pilot. Show ’em what you can do.” And he opened the door to our becoming a line item in the budget of the LA County Health Delivery System. He then left for New York where he now runs the health delivery system there.
We piloted the project in 2017. It was extremely successful. Gerson Sorto, a current NLSLA Director grew the project. We are now a line item in LA County’s Health Delivery System. We are based in a number of LA County community clinics and hospitals. The concept being that we bring together health providers, legal advocates, and we now include social workers and other professionals in this concept working together to affect the social determinants of health.
I’ll tell you a story. I made a visit to Dr. Katz with one of our emergency room doctors who had gone through Barbara’s medical legal community partnership class at USC. The doctor told the story of a woman who’d been in her emergency room three times in a month. She was very, very sick, but all the tests showed she was fine. So the doctor, after running all these tests , said, I’m going to sit down and talk to this patient. What’s going on? Well, it turned out the woman and her husband had lost their jobs, lost their income, couldn’t pay their mortgage, were putting their health bills on credit cards. They were maxed out. And she said, oh my God, you don’t need me. You need Yvonne and the medical legal community partnership. And she referred the woman to us.
That’s the story that really illustrated and demonstrated what the medical legal community partnership is. Lawyers come in. We address the legal barriers. It reduces the stress of these patients so they can then work on their health. That’s the concept of a medical legal community partnership. Today, medical legal partnerships exist across the country. The State of California and a number of legal aid programs have them. But they were first started in Boston and then Barbara brought it to Los Angeles, started the first one here, and then it expanded throughout California. Now it’s across the country. We were approached by Kaiser Permanente two years ago. They said, we want you to pilot a medical legal community partnership for us. It has now expanded. It’s at two major Kaiser hospitals here in Los Angeles. We’ve been approached by HealthNet and other health plans to do the same for them.
Alan Houseman:
Fascinating. That was very good. You also as deputy director were involved in the Homeowner Bill of Rights and foreclosure issues. So describe a little bit of that.
Yvonne Mariajimenez:
So we were heavily involved in workforce development and job training in 2008 and 2009. We had a community gathering of about 200 people at a church. We were talking about job training. Somebody raised their hand and said, “could we talk about foreclosures?” And I said, absolutely. I said, how many of you are affected or have a family member affected? And just about everybody in the auditorium raised their hand. We were stunned. I mean, I guess it hadn’t come on our radar screen. And so then we immediately began doing the research on foreclosures and found that just in our district in the San Fernando Valley, we had 14,000 foreclosures in process. The hotspots were in poverty areas in LA County, south LA and Lancaster, the Antelope Valley. So we immediately pivoted to the foreclosure crisis. We began meeting with our elected officials asking them to open the doors to the national banks so we could have some meaningful discussions around having clinics in the community to help people refinance their homes, to save their homes.
Through those efforts, we were connected to the Jamie Dimons of the banking industry. I mean, we were in discussion at the top levels of the national banks. We negotiated community clinics with mortgage finance representative of these banks where we brought individuals, reviewed their documents and vetted them and identified what their issues were. Then we met with the bank reps to negotiate modifications to save people’s homes. What we noted at the time was that people were significantly underwater. The mortgages were worth pennies on the dollar. What we really needed was principal reduction. Through that work, we were connected with the vice president of risk management at Bank of America here in Calabasas, the center for Countrywide. You might remember, Countrywide was a significant player in the subprime mortgage market that led to the foreclosure crisis and the downfall of some financial institutions. That VP and risk management statisticians he brought to the table worked with us. We figured out at the time that mortgages were worth 10 cents on the dollar. We began writing a concept of principal reduction to save peoples’ homes, and we worked with our elected officials, who had invited us to work with them to solve the foreclosure crisis. That principal reduction concept was presented to Secretary of HUD, Shawn Donovan.
Most of the people that we were helping had been convinced to take out loans on their equity. Many of them had paid off their mortgages. They took out these loans to renovate, to pay off debt, to put grandkids through college. There was a lot of press saying these homeowners were taking vacations, they were doing this and that. Most poor people were taking out their equity t to pay off debt or to renovate their homes that were in significant disrepair. But they were on fixed incomes and they couldn’t afford the loans they took out. They didn’t understand that their interest rates were going to be resetting every six months. They thought it would reset once, but the rates were resetting every six months. We had a family in Pacoima in a working class neighborhood, an impoverished community, with a home in which their mortgage payment had ballooned to $5,000 a month. They couldn’t afford it. That was the typical situation of the people that we came across.
We worked with the banks to do the individual mortgage modifications. But the banks had pernicious practices. I mean, one of the things we found was that we were negotiating modifications and they were foreclosing on a parallel track. We went to our elected officials and said, look, we cannot regulate the national banks. The states can’t touch them. But what we can do is regulate our foreclosure process in the state of California. That is how the concept of the Homeowner Bill of Rights came about. Today, that legislation forbids banks from negotiating with you on refinancing your mortgage while foreclosing at the same time. That’s one of the benefits of the Homeowners Bill of Rights achieved in the state of California. The banks gave lip service to participating in the principal reduction pilot that we created. The city of Los Angeles funded it at $10 million to start. None of the banks would agree to reduce principal. All of them just offered refinanced mortgage loans which called for a balloon payment to be made in 15 years or so. Thus, the real achievement out of the foreclosure prevention effort we undertook was the CA Homeowner Bill of Rights. We continued our clinic work to help individual homeowners refinance their mortgages thus saving thousands of homes, but we were never really able to touch the national banks or force them to do principal reduction.
Alan Houseman:
Right. Well, that’s fascinating. Then you became the president and CEO. So describe a little bit about that and particularly how you responded to COVID.
Yvonne Mariajimenez:
So I was deputy director to Neal Dudovitz who had been the NLSLA director for 25 years.
Alan Houseman:
We have an oral history of Neal, by the way.
Yvonne Mariajimenez:
So I would say so much of what I learned was under Neal’s mentorship, and I had the best but longest running mentorship program of any successor, and we did everything together. I learned a lot of what it was like to be a director. I knew how to operate this program. Neal taught me how to think about budgets, how to manipulate money to sustain the program. I learned all of that under Neal. So when Neal retired in September of 2019, and I took over, I just kept going, right? I didn’t feel like I had a new job. I just kept going doing what I had always done.
What was really the demarcation between deputy director and becoming CEO of this program happened in March of 2020 when COVID hit and then the world changed. We worked around the clock for almost two weeks to get this program up and running remotely so our services could continue, we created new policies and equipped staff to work remotely. I negotiated with our funders to turn grants into general operating support so that we could now help people without the specific deliverables that had been envisioned for a a time when the world was working in person. Now we were all remote.
So March of 2020 is what changed my job, and nothing’s been the same since. We got a payroll protection program loan to keep the lights on and people employed. We did all our work remotely. We set up clinics. Unemployment became a number one issue presenting in the program because so many people had lost their jobs. We did a lot of work around eviction protection. In Los Angeles there were many protection ordinances that were enacted. The state of California enacted a lot of protections around public benefits and eviction protection. So all of that really changed what I was doing, and it really led to a whole different way of operating in legal aid and sustaining the program, negotiating with funders, negotiating with LSC regarding extraordinary carryovers and LSC worked with legal aids across the program and provided a significant amount of flexibility to allow programs to carry over funds. So that’s really what changed my job, and it hasn’t been the same since.
Alan Houseman:
Okay. You’ve been very active in state and national work on LSC committees, state bar committees at MIE, Management Information Exchange and the Advisory Council for the Institute for Mexicans Abroad, which I nothing about. I know the other things. So describe some of your state and national work, which is in addition to your work as director of this large program.
Yvonne Mariajimenez:
California has long had a connected statewide delivery of legal services network. We’ve worked well, and the directors of the LSC programs in the state of California have been meeting together as a group for decades, and so we’ve been very involved working at a statewide level. One of the most important things I do is nurture working with relationships with our elected leaders and decision makers in Los Angeles and in the state of California. Therefore, we are invited to participate in helping elected leaders address the issues confronted by their constituents. This keeps us at the statewide table of policy advocacy. The same is true at the national level. I think one of the most important jobs I have is keeping my organization on the national stage for the Legal Services Corporation, in training, in publishing articles in MIE and lifting the legal work that we do in this organization.
I’m Vice Chair of the board of directors for MIE. I am on the training team for MIE for new executive directors. I encourage my staff of seasoned managers and upcoming leaders to train, to publish and to submit proposals so that they’re doing workshops at the national level to showcase the innovative work we do. That I believe is one of the most important things I bring to this organization because it keeps us on the national stage as an innovative legal services program that’s in the forefront of effective direct delivery service models, impact advocacy and policy work. We’re known for that and we’re known for our innovative projects. So I think that that’s one of the important things I do is to be involved at the national level.
I think it’s critical and essential that I know the leadership at the Legal Services Corporation and build working relationships with those leaders. I have done that over time, which is why I get invited to serve on some of these committees for LSC. It’s been extremely beneficial for this organization and for me. It’s something that I promote among NLSLA staff I believe could be candidates to succeed me.
Regarding the Institute for Mexicans Abroad, I was very much involved with the foreign consulates in Los Angeles in the mid 1990s. That was because we were doing a lot of education around LA County’s programs for health access. LA County has had universal healthcare. There was a program in LA County that used to serve those without status to have meaningful access to healthcare. And so we were teaching individuals, educating people in the community about this, including through trust centers, which were the consulates. I was deeply involved in all of that work.
It was through it that I met the consul general of the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles. She and the president of Mexico at the time, President Vicente Fox, asked me to serve on an advisory council to the president on behalf of Mexicans abroad including those with legal status.. There was education and outreach around the DREAM Act, which was already in conversation in Congress. There was much education around public charge, what benefits families are entitled to that doesn’t impact their immigration status. Definitely educating around US born children. Many families of immigrant households at the time were headed by parents that did not have legal status, but their children were US born. It was through that work that I was invited to serve on that advisory council, and so I did.
Alan Houseman:
That’s fascinating. You’ve received a number of awards, and you can describe them if you wish. I’m curious as to of the awards you received, what mean the most to you?
Yvonne Mariajimenez:
I’m very grateful for all the awards I’ve received. I have a box where I keep all my certificates. Very few are framed. What I’m most grateful for is the recognition of the work that I’ve done in this organization and the effective work that our organization has done. That’s what means the most to me, the fact that it’s been highlighted on the local, state and national stage, and that we’re known for being educators and trainers, and we work with organizing arms. We do not organize, but we teach, we train, and that’s our role in working with organizing institutions. We work through trust centers, so developing working and trust relationships with faith-based institutions, with schools, with parent centers, with clinics. Some of those recognitions have come out of that work.
The difference we’ve made is what’s most important to me. The certificates and awards I get are just a reminder that it’s been noted, it’s been recognized, and I’m very grateful for that.
I’m very grateful for my staff. I am the one that goes out there and talks about the organization and says, we’re going to do this, but it’s my staff that comes out and does the hard work. They’re representing on the cases they’re doing, the clinics, they’re doing education and training. So always, always, it’s my staff that really brings about this transformative work in the community. And so those awards are accepted in the name of my staff who share in all of that.
Alan Houseman:
Okay. While we’ve discussed a lot about your program, a lot about your work, I want to ask you, what is your vision for the future of civil legal aid and how do you react to access to justice initiatives such as non-lawyer advocates, self-help initiatives, tech developments, et cetera? Pretty broad questions.
Yvonne Mariajimenez:
So let me say that I think the future for legal aid is very bright. Legal aid is here to stay. You and I remember the decades after legal aid was first established, we didn’t know whether we would exist year to year. Today, I think legal aid is here to stay, and the real question is, how effective are we going to be?
There are challenges that legal aid faces today. One of them is workforce. We do not have the workforce in legal aid that we need in order to represent the people that are presenting on issues confronting the poor: evictions or immigration domestic violence. That is one of the greatest challenges we have. We don’t have the attorney workforce. I do think that this model of community workers — and it started with community health workers — is very key and very effective. I believe the state of Alaska and Nikole Nelson, the former legal aid ED there, are in the forefront of community workers that are trained by legal services and supervised by legal services to help provide education and outreach in community. I still believe that there is no greater asset for a poor person than having a lawyer to represent them. We need that. But there are a lot of other matters and cases that can be done by non-attorneys, by high functioning, skilled, proficient paralegals in the various areas that we work in. So I do think that the legal aid community at the national level needs to look at these workforce structures that bring in other non-lawyers or professionals that can also work in collaboration with attorneys and perhaps gravitate those cases that need representation, court representation to lawyers. Meanwhile, we can leverage a staff of community workers and paralegals to assist in those matters that they’re able to assist in under the supervision of an attorney.
I think that funding will continue to be an issue. The legal aid community in California and especially in Los Angeles, has spent a great deal of effort in moving our salaries to the forefront. So I believe we have one of the highest legal aid salaries in the country. Starting attorney salaries are at $80,000, and then they go up from there. Making our minimum salary $50,000 is a significant change. So I believe that executive directors have been very much focused on how do we manage to attract funding that is going to sustain the kind of compensation we need in order to keep our workforce. That includes health benefits, absorbing the healthcare costs that continue to go up, having loan repayment programs that are meaningful, having professional development training across the board for all members of the staff, not just the lawyers.
We also must be very attentive to the wellbeing of our staff. That I think is extremely important today. Money does play a role in keeping people in legal aid. But also the attentiveness that we as employers have toward our workers and ensuring their wellbeing and having work structures that meet their needs.
Since we’ve been back after COVID most legal aids have hybrid models where people get to work from home and work in the office a certain number of days. I think the hybrid model is here for a while. I don’t think we have landed on a work structure yet. Disney and some other corporate entities are now mandating that their workers come back to the office full-time. We’ll see where that lands. Some law firms are now making those decisions as well that their attorneys come back to in-person work in the offices. They know that they’re losing workers because a new generation of workforce wants flexibility. They want to be able to work from home. So I think figuring that out — how do we respond to the issues presented by our communities while also being attentive to the wellbeing of our staff — is a balancing act that we’re navigating right now.
We have a lot of talent in our organization; the new generation of leaders are smart,well-trained they’re quick, they’re techie. So I know legal aid is in good hands. The people that will succeed me will serve well, and they’re passionate about the difference they make. They’re passionate about the work that we do here in this organization. So I’m confident that legal aid will be in good hands through the new generation of leaders coming up behind me.
Alan Houseman:
Great. Well, we’ve covered most of the things I wanted to cover. Do you have any last thoughts or anything to add that you want to add to this?
Yvonne Mariajimenez:
Well, I’m also very grateful to LSC for having changed the rule on board composition. It gives us the opportunity to now recruit talent and individuals who could really help us develop effective fundraising in the organization and attract more funding to the organization. So I’m very grateful for that. It’s my hope that at some point we’ll be able to have a change in restrictions and that legal aid will be able to broaden the kind of work that it does. But I would say that LSC leadership today is very supportive. Very supportive. I find it a joy to work with the LSC leadership and with the national legal aid community.
I thrive on this work. It’s been my privilege to be a legal aid lawyer and a legal aid leader. I feel very fulfilled in my career. I feel like I’ve made a difference. We’ve also developed a lot of advocates and leaders. We’ve participated in high school projects and high school classes and college classes. We have taken a lot of kids of color, introduced them to the law, have put them through our volunteer programs, our summer internship programs. We’ve produced a lot of lawyers out of this organization that came from the inner city, that came from impoverished neighborhoods. I’m very proud of that as well.
Alan Houseman:
Great. Well, thank you. This has been terrific.
Yvonne Mariajimenez:
Well, thank you, Alan. Thanks for your interest and curiosity and for your written history of civil legal aid. I hand that document to every summer cohort of law students and say, “You’re becoming part of a legacy that has been transformative in this country.” So the work that you’ve done in memorializing the history really continues to teach young people coming up to understand the difference legal aid has made and the landmark rulings that came about because of legal aid. So thank you for having been the historian of legal aid in this country.
Alan Houseman:
Thank you.
END