October 2011

By Brooke Lierman, an attorney at the civil rights firm, Brown, Goldstein & Levy LLP in Baltimore, Md. Ms. Lierman is on the Executive Committee of the Maryland Lawyer Chapter of ACS.

The White House recently added to its growing list of Champions of Change, a group of 16 individuals working, in the words of Attorney General Eric Holder, “to address and to overcome our most pressing legal challenges and to live up to our nation’s highest ideals.” 

The event, last week, was the latest in a series sponsored by the White House Office of Public Engagement (OPE), which seeks (in the words of the Office’s director Jon Carson) to shine a spotlight on the good work that Americans are doing every day in their communities.

This event was organized jointly by OPE and the Department of Justice Access to Justice Initiative, an office created by Attorney General Holder (pictured) to ensure that basic legal services are available and accessible to everyone in the country.  

Attorney General Holder offered some prepared remarks discussing the important work that the honorees perform in their communities.  The 16 individuals, listed below, represented all spheres of the legal community – from professors to directors of legal services programs to general counsel of a major corporation. The White House and Department of Justice honored them and invited them to participate in roundtable discussions about the challenges facing today’s legal system. 

by Jeremy Leaming

A couple of national newspaper columnists examine some numbers and commentary on poverty and economic inequality, as the Occupy Wall Street protests hit their one month anniversary with noted momentum.

The Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr., notes in this piece, some comments on poverty rates of families made during a recent Republican presidential debate by former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum. Essentially Santorum, a longtime advocate of Religious Right activists, argues that government should push policy that supports only families headed by mothers and fathers. “You can’t have a wealthy society if the family breaks down,” Santorum said.

Dionne says Santorum “is broadly right,” citing a study by the National Center for Children in Poverty covering “the 2005 – 09 period,” that “5 percent of married family households were poor at some point within a given year, compared with 28.8 percent of single-parent households. For 2010, the figures were 8.4 percent and 39.6 percent, respectively.”

But instead of going off on a tangent about how government recognition of marriage for gay couples will render straight marriages meaningless, as Santorum often does, Dionne says “Liberals should acknowledge, as Obama has, that strengthening the family is vital to economic justice. Conservatives should acknowledge that economic justice is vital to strengthening families.”

And Dionne points to some work in this area by Harry Holzer, a professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, and Peter Edelman, an ACS Board member and longtime advocate for tackling poverty in America.

In a 2006 book published by the Urban Institute, Holzer, the late Paul Offner, and Edelman (pictured) tackle “the thorny challenge of getting ‘disconnected’ young men back in school or the workforce.”

The book, Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men, focuses on African American and Hispanic men “because young women have made more progress in recent years and their prospects have been spotlighted in discussions of welfare reform and other social changes,” a press statement about the publication says.