Pro Bono Net is pleased to welcome two summer interns, and to announce our participation in two upcoming conferences. We continue to generate great coverage of our programs, this time from the Carnegie Corporation’s "Results” newsletter. And Court Collaboration Circuit Rider Claudia Johnson can now be found in Washington State, after making her second cross-country move in less than two years.
Our summer interns are Neha Mohan, who is entering her second year of business school at The University of Chicago, and Sarah Tona, who is entering her junior year at New York University. Neha, whose background includes consulting and software development, will be working on business issues related to Pro Bono Manager, our pro bono practice management software for law firms. Sarah will be working on the probono.net/ny site as well as projects related to marketing and communications.
We are very proud that the Immigration Advocates Network (IAN), the national online network developed by Pro Bono Net and leading immigration advocacy groups, was selected by The Carnegie Corporation to be the focus of their summer 2009 “Carnegie Results” newsletter. Carnegie helped fund the development of IAN, and recently awarded it a new two-year grant of $400,000.
Pro Bono Net also contributed an article to June’s Law Technology News about the value of pro bono work at a time of great uncertainty in the legal profession.
There was additional good news for IAN when Matthew Burnett, IAN’s Project Coordinator, was selected for the Coro New York Leadership Center’s Immigrant Civic Leadership Program. Participants in this part-time, six-month program develop advanced strategies and skills for expanding opportunities for immigrants and for shaping public policy decisions, and also work on developing their own leadership skills.
Matthew, Claudia Johnson and LawHelp Program Manager Liz Keith spoke at multiple sessions at the 2009 Equal Justice Conference in May. They shared their expertise on topics including the role of technology in disaster recovery, foreclosure relief and expanding access to courts.
Claudia and Kate Bladow, NPADO Project Coordinator, are both speaking at conferences this summer. Claudia will be speaking at the Southeastern Project Directors Association annual conference on July 13 about document assembly initiatives in the South. Kate will speak at the American Association of Law Libraries Annual Meeting on July 26 in Washington, DC. She will be part of a session entitled, “Online Interactive Court Forms for Self-Represented Litigants: The Library’s Role.”
Finally, this past spring Claudia relocated from Connecticut to Eastern Washington. This move comes less than a year after she and her family moved to the East Coast from California. “Eastern Washington has awesome rivers with wide, well-kept parks and excellent produce,” she reports. “My children have befriended a river snake (after frantic calling of the nuisance line where the local expert told us it was a good snake to have around and not a rattlesnake). At night, we go to sleep to the yelping of coyotes."
