Closing Out Our Public Interest Leadership Development Series
Earlier this week, Todd Belcore, a 3L at Northwestern who will begin an Equal Justice Works Fellowship later this year, posted the final of three installments in our series on the importance of public-interest minded law students developing leadership skills. The series also featured posts from Emily Benfer, who is teaching a class on public interest leadership at the Georgetown University Law Center, and Ericka Hines, a program manager at Equal Justice Works.
The idea for this series came about when I was speaking with a legal services organization about best practices in composing public-interest fellowship grant proposals with graduating law students. One of the themes that recurred in our conversation is that the goal of fellowship programs like Skadden and Equal Justice Works is to cultivate the next generation of public interest leaders, not just the next generation of public interest lawyers. But leadership development opportunities are not important just for the small cadre of grads who are awarded fellowship grants. All law students on public interest career paths should cultivate a broad array of advocacy skills – knowing how to engage client communities, working with the media, and building advocacy coalitions, among others – in order to make themselves most marketable to employers and to succeed as lawyers.
Here’s an article I contributed to the current NALP Bulletin magazine (the audience of which is primarily legal career professionals), which expands on this topic and links to a handful of resources that I hope may be helpful to those students and junior attorneys who are interested in developing leadership skills. (The resources include tips on developing relationships with reporters, “messaging” through the media, and delivering effective legislative testimony.)
– Steve Grumm