Pro Bono
| Jurisdiction | United States,Federal,Georgia |
| Citation | Vol. 24 No. 2 Pg. 0056 |
| Pages | 0056 |
| Publication year | 2018 |
The Healing Power of Pro Bono
As you consider whether and how to make pro bono part of your practice, never underestimate the impact you can have.
BY MICHAEL LUCAS
As has been detailed in this column before, there are many good reasons to do pro bono work. In addition to making a real difference in the lives of our neighbors too often denied access to justice, you can develop skills, expand your network, and even enhance your career. Through Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundations' (AVLF) Standing with Our Neighbors program, which embeds teams of AVLF staff attorneys, community advocates and volunteer attorneys inside neighborhood
schools to help stabilize the community, I have come to appreciate another powerful reason to make pro bono part of your practice: you can be part of someone's healing process. Let me explain.
Many of the clients served by AVLF and our amazing sister organizations in the pro bono community have a healthy sense of distrust of not just legal institutions, but institutions in general. They have come by this distrust honestly. Specifically, many are living with the long-lasting effects of pain and trauma. In far too many cases, institutions have failed to protect or help them or have been directly involved in inflicting the harm. Organizations or agencies charged with assisting them may not have kept their word or had enough resources to follow through. The judicial system may have played a role, real or perceived, in what they experienced as an injustice in their lives.
At AVLF, we might see this in the children who are living in trauma because the conditions of their rental housing are akin to a third-world slum, despite years of efforts by their mom to get any institution to intervene. For the clients of our friends at organizations like the Georgia Asylum and Immigration Network, it could mean that after the institutions in their home country failed to protect them from violence, the legal institutions here are deaf to their pleas and working to send them back. In either case, the therapeutic community and common sense tells us that those clients will develop a well-founded sense of distrust. And that distrust, while understandable, often impedes their ability to move forward, to accept help, to thrive. What might be perceived as irresponsible behavior?e.g., not returning a call from legal services, not showing up for an...
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