The Shriver Brief : Poverty Law Commentary & Insights : Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law : Affordable Housing, Healthcare Reform

The non-profit Shriver Center provides national leadership in efforts to increase justice and opportunity for low-income people by ensuring a humane safety net, a chance to prosper, and a voice and representation in public decisions that affect them. The Center engages in direct advocacy campaigns in Illinois and around the country to improve policies and programs on specific issues, and also engages in broader advocacy on general issues of justice and opportunity.

John Bouman, President. John Bouman was named president of the Shriver Center effective January 1, 2007. He also remains the Shriver Center's director of advocacy, his position since 1996. He joined the Shriver Center in May 1996 after twenty-one years at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago, where he supervised public benefits issues and policy advocacy from 1985. Prior to that, he provided multi-issue direct representation in several Chicago neighborhoods for nine years and held a position as a specialist in the foundation's Elderly Law Project. He has won numerous awards for his career and accomplishments in antipoverty legal and advocacy work. He is recognized for being one of the most effective and thoughtful public-benefit advocates in the country. He was a leader in the design and implementation of positive aspects of Illinois's new welfare law in 1997. Recently he led the successful statewide effort to create the FamilyCare program to provide health care insurance to up to 300,000 working poor parents of minor children, and he was a leader in the successful advocacy to create All Kids, the first state program of universal coverage for children. Bouman is lead counsel in Memisovski v. Maram, a successful case establishing substantial reforms in children's health care in Illinois. He is a founding and current member of the steering committee of the National Transitional Jobs Network. He is a frequent lecturer and trainer on a variety of social policy, advocacy, and lawyering subjects. He is a 1975 graduate of Valparaiso University School of Law and member of the Chicago Council of Lawyers and the Chicago Bar Association.

Todd Belcore, Equal Justice Works Fellow, Sponsored by Greenberg, Traurig. Todd Belcore is a staff attorney and Equal Justice Works Fellow focusing on litigating, organizing, educating, and crafting legislation to ensure that former offenders are not unjustly denied employment or occupational licenses. Todd is a graduate of the Northwestern University School of Law, where he served as president of a public service organization (SERV) and, later, as the Student Bar Association President. In these roles, he was able to significantly increase the amount of exposure law students had to public interest and public service. In recognition of Todd's commitment to public interest, he was the chosen recipient of the 2009 PSLawNet Pro Bono Public Award, which honors one law student nationwide for pro bono contributions to society. Todd was also the chosen recipient of Northwestern University School of Law's Wigmore Key, which is given to the graduating student who has done the most to preserve the traditions of the law school.

Ilze Sprudzs Hirsh, Vice President of Communication Programs. Ilze Sprudzs Hirsh, who has been with the Shriver Center since January 1989, has overall responsibility for the publication of Clearinghouse Review: Journal of Poverty Law and Policy and facilitates the development of the Shriver Center's poverty law library and website. She transforms exchanges of ideas with advocates into themes for Review articles or entire issues. She previously served as the Shriver Center's deputy director as well as acting executive director. With a J.D. from the University of Illinois College of Law, she began her legal career as a staff attorney in the general counsel's office of the Illinois Department of Public Aid in Springfield, Illinois. She was an associate with Friedemann, Stone, LaScala, Keto & Fingal in Orange, California, before returning to her native Chicago to work as a legal editor at CCH, a major legal publisher. She has a bachelor's degree in German and health studies from St. Olaf College.
 

Marcia Henry, Senior Attorney-Legal Editor. Marcia Henry joined the Shriver Center in 2000. In addition to ongoing editing and editorial planning duties, she has planned and coordinated special issues of Clearinghouse Review--on privatization (Jan.-Feb. 2002), representing immigrants (July-Aug. 2004), civil right to counsel (July-Aug. 2006), and representing clients with criminal records (July-Aug. 2007)--as well as the Poverty Law Manual for the New Lawyer. She was the editor of Youth Law News at the National Center for Youth Law for fifteen years and worked at the Child Care Law Center. She received her J.D., with distinction, from Hofstra University School of Law and worked as a staff attorney and Reginald Heber Smith Fellow at Westchester Legal Services. She serves on the board of the Benchmark Institute, which delivers training to enhance the work of poverty lawyers and other advocates. She telecommutes from Oakland, California, and, on occasion, from her Vancouver Island vacation home in Sooke, British Columbia.

Karen K. Harris, Director, Asset Opportunity. Karen K. Harris became supervising attorney of the Shriver Center's Community Investment Unit in October 2008. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, she worked in private law firms, such as DLA Piper and Seyfarth Shaw LLC, for over fourteen years in the area of health care law. Along with her private practice, she has published and presented on numerous health law issues as well as diversity issues in the legal profession. A native of Chicago, she lives with her family in the West Loop.

Michele Host, Staff Attorney-Legal Editor. Before joining the Shriver Center in 2010, Michele Host was a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Family Representation, where she represented indigent parents in child welfare cases in New York County Family Court. She began her legal career as an associate at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy and then clerked for the Honorable Denny Chin in the District Court for the Southern District of New York. She also spent a year in Washington, D.C., as Public Citizen's Supreme Court Assistance Project Fellow; practiced criminal defense law at the Legal Aid Society's Criminal Defense Division; and represented employees in discrimination cases at Vladeck, Waldman, Elias & Englehard, P.C. In addition, she spent a year in India teaching legal writing and volunteering with the Aalochana Center for Research and Documentation on Women. She graduated cum laude from the New York University School of Law, where she received the Ann Petluck Poses Prize for Excellence in Clinical Practice, and received a B.A. in Political Science and Theatre from Grinnell College.

Andrea Kovach, Staff Attorney. Andrea Kovach is with the Community Investment Unit and the Health Care Unit. She joined the Shriver Center after working at the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, where she handled a wide range of legal matters, including felony preliminary hearings and bond hearings, bench and jury trials, and civil hearings for orders of protection. She was the lead attorney in a courtroom that handled hundreds of cases weekly, and she argued before the First District Appellate Court. She wrote and advocated enacted legislation on prosecuting domestic violence cases. She trained law enforcement officers on legal issues and led discussions with religious and social service organizations. She is a proud alumna of Wellesley College and the University of Illinois College of Law, where she graduated magna cum laude and was administrative editor of the University of Illinois Law Review. 

Dan Lesser, Director, Economic Security. Dan Lesser, who is with the Shriver Center's welfare unit, specializes in child care, immigrant rights, teen, and welfare-to-work issues. He was very involved in the creation of a consolidated, income-based, universal child care assistance program in Illinois; he served on the statewide advisory committee to the state agency and worked in coalition with advocates and service providers throughout the reform process. He has been a significant participant in the coalitions that have obtained partial federal and state removal of the 1996 federal welfare law's draconian restrictions on the eligibility of legal immigrants for public benefits. He co-convenes a state advisory committee on service coordination to families involved in both the financial assistance and child welfare systems. Before joining the Shriver Center, he was a senior staff attorney at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago, where he worked for seven years. Before that, he was in private practice for four years. He is a 1984 graduate of Northwestern University School of Law and a 1978 graduate of Princeton University.

Amanda Moore, Staff Attorney-Legal Editor. Amanda Moore previously worked as an Equal Justice Works Fellow and then Staff Attorney at the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, where she represented low-income clients on coal mining-related issues. She continues to serve on the Law Center’s Board and also teaches Legal Writing and Research at Middle Tennessee State University. Before working in eastern Kentucky, Amanda clerked for the Honorable Boyce F. Martin, Jr., then Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School and graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. from Western Kentucky University. She telecommutes from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the geographic center of the state.

Caitlin Padula,Staff Attorney/University of Chicago Fellow. Caitlin Padula is a staff attorney focusing primarily on health care issues, including the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in Illinois. Caitlin is a graduate of Loyola University of Chicago and the University of Chicago Law School, where she served on the Spring Break of Service board and was involved with the Immigrant Child Advocacy Project. For her clinical work, she was awarded the Mandel Legal Clinic Service Award.

Wendy Pollack, Director, Women's Law and Policy Project. Wendy Pollack is the founder and director of the Women's Law and Policy Project (WLPP) at the Shriver Center. The WLPP draws on the experiences of women and girls and brings those experiences to the forefront in the Shriver Center's analysis of poverty and the development of solutions to end poverty permanently. Pollack has been working extensively on public benefits and work supports, workforce and economic development, education, employment, family law, violence against women and girls, gender equity in schools, and other issues affecting low-income women and girls, on the local, state, and federal level. She is the editor of WomanView, a newsletter on developments in legal issues affecting low-income women and girls. Her most recent publication is a chapter in the three-volume set, Bringing Human Rights Home (Praeger Publishers 2007), which chronicles the history of human rights in the United States from the perspective of domestic social justice activism. Before coming to the Shriver Center in May 1996, she worked on the welfare law team at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago and as one of its neighborhood staff attorneys. Before becoming a lawyer, she was a union carpenter and cofounder of Chicago Women Carpenters in 1979 and Chicago Women in Trades in 1982. She serves on the board of directors of the Chicago Jobs Council. She is a 1989 graduate of Harvard Law School.

Kathleen Rubenstein, Staff Attorney/Skadden Fellow. Kathleen Rubenstein is a staff attorney funded by a two-year fellowship from the Skadden Foundation. Her fellowship project aims to coordinate workforce development and economic development, while addressing education and training policy in Illinois. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago with a degree in History, Kathleen worked as a paralegal at a civil rights firm specializing in police brutality and constitutional litigation. She graduated from the University of Chicago Law School with honors in 2010, having served on the board of the Public Interest Law Society and the Chicago Law Foundation, and participated in the police accountability clinic.

Margaret Stapleton, Senior Attorney. Margaret Stapleton has thirty-five years of experience practicing welfare and civil rights law. At the Shriver Center she focuses on public benefits, health care, child support, and former-offender issues; she is always searching for ways to make government and nongovernment services, programs, and opportunities effective and open to all low-income people--even to less popular low-income groups such as noncustodial parents and people with criminal convictions. She serves on the Illinois Department of Health and Human Services' Social Service Advisory Committee and Food Stamp Participation Advisory Committee and the Illinois Department of Health Care and Family Services' Child Support Advisory Committee. Before joining the Shriver Center in 1996, she worked as a staff attorney in the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago's welfare team for ten years and with legal services and civil rights organizations in Cairo and East St. Louis, Illinois, for fifteen years. She is a member of the Chicago Council of Lawyers and a board member of the Center on Family Policy and Practice.
 

Marie Claire Tran-Leung, Loyola Fellow/Staff Attorney. Marie Claire Tran-Leung returned to the Shriver Center in September 2007 under a two-year fellowship from Loyola of Los Angeles Law School. Her fellowship project aims to reduce employment barriers for people with criminal records. She focuses on increasing the accuracy and reliability of those records as well as limiting their dissemination by private companies. After graduating from Northwestern University with a B.A. in political science in 2002, she arrived at the Shriver Center to work on housing issues originally as a volunteer and then as an Americorps*VISTA. Two years later she went back to her hometown of Los Angeles to attend Loyola under the Public Interest Scholars Program. During law school she clerked for Public Advocates Inc., Asian Pacific American Legal Center, and Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago. She also served as an articles editor for the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review. In her spare time she enjoys reading books, gardening, and listening to live music.

Katherine E. Walz, Director, Housing Justice. A 1996 graduate of DePaul College of Law and a 1993 graduate of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Katherine E. Walz began her legal career at the Lawyers' Committee for Better Housing, where she spearheaded a comprehensive pilot project demonstrating the benefits of providing legal representation to tenants in Chicago's Eviction Court. She then worked in private practice on civil rights and criminal defense cases. She returned to legal aid as executive director of First Defense Legal Aid (FDLA). She served as an adjunct clinical professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. With the Shriver Center since late 2001, she advocates on behalf of low-income individuals and families living in or in need of public, subsidized, or affordable housing. She is class counsel in Wallace v. CHA, a case that challenges the Chicago Housing Authority's discriminatory relocation practices for residents; Concerned Residents of ABLA v. CHA, another class action suit involving public housing demolition and relocation; and Chicago ACORN v. HUD, a class action suit challenging the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's termination of the project-based Section 8 contract of one of the biggest developments in the country. She spearheads the housing advocacy policy work in a lead role on the Source of Income Working Group, the Tenants Rights Working Group, and the Safe Homes Initiative. She serves on the board of directors of FDLA and the Metropolitan Tenants Organization.