Tag: Legal Outreach

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Legal Outreach Invites You to Become a Mentor for High School Students

Now, more than ever, students at New York City’s public schools are grappling with questions of inequality and whether the law is the same as justice. Legal Outreach’s Mentoring Program allows attorneys and law school graduates to directly impact high school students from traditionally under-represented backgrounds by guiding them through high school and modeling what it means to be an attorney and to engage with the law – and allows attorneys to consider these questions, too! You and the members of Asian American Bar Association of New York (AABANY) are invited to apply now to volunteer to be a Mentor, starting the 2021-22 academic year!
Attorneys meet with their students once a month to get to know each other and discuss any issues and obstacles students are facing. Mentors, with materials provided by Legal Outreach, also help students through Legal Outreach’s Constitutional Law Debate Program. In Debate, students learn and apply Supreme Court precedent to issues directly affecting the country, such as qualified immunity, political apparel at polling sites, education rights for undocumented students, gerrymandering and voting rights, discrimination in housing developments, and more. 
To be a Mentor, a volunteer needs just their JD and the ability to commit to 4-6 hours a month to meet and communicate with their student. It is a low-time, high-impact program that will help shape the course of a young person’s life and make the legal profession a more inclusive one. It is so important for our students to be able to see a model of what they can do with a law degree and see themselves represented in the profession. 
Apply here by August 15, 2021 to be a Mentor starting the 2021-22 academic year!

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Make an Impact – Mentor with Legal Outreach

About Legal Outreach:

Legal Outreach prepares youth from underserved communities in New York City to compete at high academic levels by using intensive legal and educational programs as tools for fostering vision, developing skills, enhancing confidence, and facilitating the pursuit of higher education. We use law to attract rising high school students to academic programs that inspire and motivate them to strive for academic success.

About the Mentoring Program:

Legal Outreach’s Mentoring Program allows attorneys and law school graduates to directly impact high school students from traditionally under-represented backgrounds by guiding them through high school and modeling what it means to be an attorney and to engage with the law – and allows attorneys to consider these questions, too!

Attorneys meet with their students once a month to hang out and talk about the issues and obstacles students are facing. Mentors, with materials provided by Legal Outreach, also help students through the Constitutional Law Debate Program. In Debate, students learn and apply Supreme Court precedent to issues directly affecting the country, such as qualified immunity, which weapons are protected under the Second Amendment, education rights for undocumented students, gerrymandering and voting rights, discrimination in housing developments, and more. 

Legal Outreach’s Mentoring Program is an integral tool for helping our students achieve academic success, and is a low cost, high reward volunteer activity. Mentoring a Legal Outreach student only takes around 4-6 hours per month and is a 3 year commitment (mentors work with students from their Sophomore year through Senior year). Mentors help students with their Constitutional Law Debates, guide them academically, and inspire them by providing one-on-one support throughout their high school careers and even after mentees matriculate to college. JD is required. Mentors can also receive 3 CLE Credits per reporting cycle.

“My mentor is very supportive of my accomplishments and hard work. He’s always willing to talk about any problems and to teach me anything new.” Legal Outreach Student

“I have recommended the program to numerous friends, I think Legal Outreach is a fantastic program and I am happy to be involved.” Legal Outreach Mentor

Apply Now at www.legaloutreach.org/mentor

Due to the ongoing impact of COVID-19, the Mentoring Program will be implemented virtually during the 2020-21 academic year.

Mentor/Mentee Events Hosted by Legal Outreach

Sept. 29, 2020 6pm-8pm New Mentor Orientation
Oct. 8, 2020 6pm-8pm Meet mentees at Octoberfeast!
Nov. 13, 2020 6pm-9pm Debate 1
March 12, 2021 6pm-9pm Debate 2
End of March/early April 2021 Debate 3 (qualifying students)

Questions? Contact Marla Trinidad, Law-Related Education Coordinator, at [email protected].

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Legal Outreach prepares urban youth from underserved neighborhoods in New York City to compete at high academic levels by using intensive legal and educational programs as a tool for fostering vision, developing skills, enhancing confidence, and facilitating the pursuit of higher education.

Legal Outreach wants you! Volunteer with Legal Outreach as an Attorney Mentor!

CONNECT with a NYC high school student, positively IMPACT their lives, and INSPIRE them to pursue higher heights!

To apply to be a mentor or for more information, click on the link in the title.

Thank you MBBA for sharing this opportunity with us.

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The Legal Outreach Attorney Mentor Program, Apply by Aug. 24

Legal Outreach prepares urban youth from underserved neighborhoods in New York City to compete at high academic levels by using intensive legal and educational programs as a tools for fostering vision, developing skills, enhancing confidence, and facilitating the pursuit of higher education.

Legal Outreach wants you! Volunteer with Legal Outreach as an Attorney Mentor!

CONNECT with a NYC high school student, positively IMPACT their lives, and INSPIRE them to pursue higher heights!

To apply to be a mentor or for more information click here! Applications are due by August 24, 2015!

Special thanks to MBBA (Metropolitan Black Bar Association) for sharing this announcement with us. 

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Mentors Needed for Legal Outreach

Thanks to Board member Will Ng for sharing this call for mentors from Legal Outreach. Please read and respond to the call if you are available to help out.

At Legal Outreach, we focus on helping underserved students matriculate to top colleges and universities. We have been very successful in our efforts, as every one of our students graduates from high school, 85% complete college within four years, and 14% go on to become lawyers themselves.

We achieve these results through comprehensive programming that includes internships for the students at law firms and public interest organizations, SAT prep, after-school tutoring, and academic counseling. We also run a Constitutional Law Debate Program where students read fact patterns, analyze case-law, prepare briefs, and perfect oral arguments for constitutional law debates.  

All students in our program are assigned an Attorney  Mentor. These mentors are lawyers from major legal services firms, non-profit organizations, and government agencies throughout New York City. We are currently recruiting 50 attorneys to be mentors to our rising-sophomores. Attorney Mentors play an integral role in the success of our program and, based on surveys, students have credited much of their academic, personal, and professional accomplishments to the guidance and support they have received from their mentors.  

Mentoring is a low-commitment, high reward volunteer activity. Although we do ask that our mentors commit to mentoring a student from their sophomore through senior years of high school, mentoring is only a 4 hour per month commitment. Mentors help students with their constitutional law debate preparation and provide academic and personal counseling to our students. Mentors also receive 3 CLE credits each reporting cycle for participating in our Attorney Mentoring Program. 

Our online mentoring application is found at: www.legaloutreach.org/mentor. The application takes only 10-15 minutes to complete. More information about the mentoring program can be found at http://www.legaloutreach.org/ and on Legal Outreach’s mentoring program page. If you have any additional questions, please feel free to reach out to Ari Joseph, Director of Legal Education at Legal Outreach, at 718.752.0222, ext. 208.

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Legal Outreach Volunteering Opportunity

Sheila Bautista, AABANY member and prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office, shares the following volunteer opportunity with us:

Since 1983, Legal Outreach has provided underserved minority students in New York City with the academic support and mentorship they deserve.  As rising ninth graders, students begin the program by participating in the Summer Law Institute, a five-week program that concludes with a mock trial in front of a real judge in a real courtroom.  In high school, students participate in Legal Outreach’s College Bound program, a rigorous college preparatory track of after-school tutoring, Saturday writing classes, SAT preparation, mock trials and debates, life skills courses, internships, and mentoring from staff, law students, and professional attorneys.

Legal Outreach is currently seeking to recruit volunteer attorneys to serve as mentors to students participating in its Constitutional Law Debate program, one of the key components of the College Bound Program.  This is an excellent opportunity to participate in a rewarding program with proven results—100% of Legal Outreach students graduate high school in four years, compared to 59% of New York City students.  Over 99% of Legal Outreach graduates have matriculated at four-year colleges and 68% percent matriculate at highly selective colleges, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, University of Michigan, Smith, and Wesleyan.

One of Legal Outreach’s defining goals is to increase diversity within the legal profession. According to the American Lawyer Diversity Scorecard 2010, the percentage of minority lawyers at large firms dropped for the first time in recent memory this past year, now standing at only 13.4%.  The raw number of Asian-American lawyers dropped the most, by 556 attorneys.  While the proportion of minorities enrolled in law school and employed in the legal profession has always been low compared to minority representation in the overall population, this negative trend needs to be combated.  By providing minority students with an early-intervention program to bolster academic preparation and vision, Legal Outreach is working to raise these numbers. Legal Outreach has been recognized by the American Bar Association as an outstanding pipeline diversity program and by American Lawyer as “arguably the legal profession’s best example of an early-intervention pipeline program—and one of the few with a long-term track record.”  In fact, nearly 15% of our College Bound students go on to become practicing attorneys. 

To learn more and apply to volunteer with Legal Outreach, please visit our website at www.legaloutreach.org or e-mail Ariel Joseph, Esq. at [email protected].