The 2009 Norm Maleng Advocate for Youth Award Breakfast
Perkins Coie Law Firm: 2nd annual Norm Maleng Advocate for Youth Award
Inaugural award winner and the late King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng's widow, Judy (far right), presented the award to the law firm, Perkins Coie LLP.
In 2008, the firm's attorneys, staff and summer associates in its 15 offices throughout the United States and China contributed more than 40,000 hours of pro bono time to charitable causes, including nearly 18,000 hours in the Seattle/Bellevue area. Three-quarters of Perkins Coie's lawyers worked on pro bono matters and contributed an average of 56 pro bono hours each last year.
For six months in 2008, local attorney Kate Vaughan (at podium, beside firm attorney Julia Parsons Clarke) worked full-time at the Center for Children & Youth Justice through the Perkins Coie Community Service Fellowship. Kate was able to use her time to establish the Center's very successful Lawyers Fostering Independence program. Several of the firm's other attorneys have been trained for the program and continue to volunteer.
The firm also provides pro bono services in dozens of dependency cases involving allegations of child abuse and neglect, works with immigrant youth with claims of political asylum or seeking special immigrant juvenile status, and has a long-standing commitment to working against the practice of sentencing youth to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
CCYJ is very proud to present the award to its friends at Perkins Coie!
Speakers laud progress and look to the future
It was a celebration of great progress, a sobering reflection on flaws in the systems serving children and youth, a recognition of meaningful contributions, and a look forward to new opportunities. The 2nd annual CCYJ breakfast fundraiser on May 13 prompted guests to think and to take action toward the goal of better systems, better lives.
"I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think."
Breakfast keynote speaker Shay Bilchik quoted Socrates as he shared his insights into how our nation can improve its systems of juvenile justice and child welfare.
The founder and director of the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute, Bilchik said that "love, opportunity and hope are at the heart of everything we do every day for youth in these systems." To enable them to find love, to take advantage of opportunity and to live with hope means providing youth with permanent family relationships, life skills training, connections and support, he said.
Bilchik called for a national policy on children and youth in America overseen by a White House-level office similar to the one in place for national drug control policy. He said that to effect major changes in children and youth justice will require four things: political will and leadership, the public perception that these issues are important, structural changes, and fiscal underpinnings.
The Center for Children & Youth Justice is at the forefront of a new era of change in our child welfare and juvenile justice systems -- an era where change "is no longer primarily the province of policy wonks and ivory-towered academics... but is an economic necessity in both the public and private sectors."
Bobbe Bridge highlighted a few of the Center's efforts over the past year toward effecting meaningful systemic change and noted that the year ahead holds more opportunities."We've had a great year and we can have another one," Justice Bridge said. "We are ready to take advantage of the changing times. We hope you're ready too. Change is in the air."
Ruvin Munden: From a life on the streets to a passion for helping others
Ruvin Munden's home life with a mentally ill and abusive mother was so terrible, he began running away from home at the age of 11 to live in newspaper bins and on the streets.
"One time I ran away after my mother bit me three times on the back drawing blood," Munden told guests at the CCYJ breakfast. "A friend's mother called CPS; I told the caseworker what happened and... she told me she would take care of it. The caseworker drove me straight home and sat me down in front of my mother and insisted I tell my mother what I had told her. I was absolutely terrified; I said I had lied and that a dog did it. I was left in my mother's care that day..."
His distrust of CPS and other authority figures grew from there. The state eventually took Munden away from his mother, but foster care wasn't much better, so he took off for the streets. He lived as a homeless youth for years, eventually turning to drugs and crime.
Today, Munden is an honors graduate of Seattle University and works for Big Brothers Big Sisters.
"I have gone from feeling completely miserable and purposeless to living a life filled with great joy, meaning and purpose," he said. "I know what has worked for me, and I believe it is what will work for others. A feeling of empathy from people I could relate to humanized me and made me feel noticed; receiving an education was equally important in helping to empower me to face the world as a different person.
"We need policies which will likewise acknowledge and empower our youth and service providers; not ones which are disempowering and marginalize them. Youth at-risk deserve to be nurtured into well-developed productive members of society with the same chances of happiness and utility as everyone else. This is that the work the Center seeks to do."
(Read all of Ruvin Munden's compelling story.)