Thursday, January 11, 2007

Success!!

The Fordham SHN Winter Break Trip was a great success! Thank you to all who helped us out, through participating, helping plan, supporting, attending fundraisers and everything else you all did to make the trip possible! We are very proud of what Fordham students have accomplished over the course of the past year, through their participation with SHN trips and other SHN work!

Just some background about SHN's history -- the organization was formed by law students in the months following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to address the pressing needs, legal and otherwise, of the people in the Gulf Coast, by matching law students with legal nonprofits for a week. Check out the National SHN site: www.studenthurricanenetwork.org. Last year over 1,000 SHN law students from over 70 law schools traveled to work in the region to work on a number of issues, including criminal justice, housing rights, workers' rights and voting rights, among others. This Winter, more than 500 law students from 28 law schools are heading south to the hurricane-affected areas of Louisiana and Mississippi. Additionally SHN has connected law advocates with displaced residents to help them return home, provided free legal researchers to hurricane-focused projects, educated law students about Katrina-related lobbying efforts, and helped prepare disaster preparedness plans with state bar associations across the country. The organization is completely student-run and organized but we welcome the participation and support from the larger law school community!

Of course, we are particularly proud of Fordham's participation in the SHN's efforts from the beginning. We have been lucky to get a great amount of support from our administration and the Public Interest Resource Center, which have been instrumental in allowing us to send large numbers of students down to the Gulf Coast for our student trips. This Winter we had 29 students volunteer in New Orleans and Mississippi, in various capacities. Nineteen students, 2 professors and one administrator worked on the Katrina Gideon-Interview Project. The Project had teams of students, supervised by attorneys, working on cases in the Criminal Justice system. The work was done in conjunction with Professor Pamela Metzger of the Tulane Law Clinic, and involved working with the Public Defenders' Office, studying cases, interviewing inmates and making phone calls to their families, identifiying cases that have been lost in the system, and generally bearing witness to the situation in Louisiana's criminal justice system. Other students worked in any number of other capacities: three students worked with the People's Organizing Commitee, both doing physical labor such as gutting houses, and also conducting outreach and documentation related to housing issues; a couple of students worked with the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, conducting outreach related to wage and hour claims and also acting as legal observers during interactions between workers and the police. Four students went to Mississippi and worked with the Mississippi Center for Justice and the Mississippi Workers' Center for Human Rights. This work involved conducting surveys of residents regarding their knowledge of and experience with various federal and state homeowner recovery programs, as well meeting with local officials and attorneys, and a visit to the state capitol to meet with Mississippi state legislators to discuss the issues facing residents of the Gulf Coast in MIssissippi's efforts to rebuild. Though the trip was only one week there are so many stories to tell! We really hope that this blog will give students, professors, administrators and friends a forum to share their stories. .

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