New Season and New Format – SideBar: Optimism in Action with Jackie Gardina and Mitch Winick

Episode Notes

Transcript

Mitch Winick:

SideBar is brought to you by Monterey College of Law, San Luis Obispo College of Law, Kern County College of Law, empire College of Law, located in Santa Rosa and the Colleges of Law with campuses in Santa Barbara and Ventura.

Announcer:

Welcome to SideBar discussions with local, state, and national experts about protecting our most critical individual and civil rights co-hosts, LA Deans, Jackie Gardina and Mitch Winick.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie, I’m very excited to talk about what we’re discussing as a new format for SideBar as we’re entering the 2025 third season of SideBar with new challenges going on in our communities and our country. You and I have talked about shifting our format to talk about lawyers and other community leaders who are taking actions, focused on humanitarian interests and good works within the community, positive stories, hard work that frequently is unrecognized. That’s the direction we would like to take are episodes and our storytelling on SideBar.

Jackie Gardina:

When we started the podcast, because we’re both educators, we really wanted to focus on educating the public about constitutional issues that we saw arising again and again, and making sure that they understood what the implications of those constitutional issues were to everyday life. And while we ended every podcast with a call to action, our focus now is going to be to flip that model and to focus instead on the call to action and highlight people who are specifically addressing issues in their communities, whether it’s a legal issue or a policy issue or a humanitarian issue, and really show that call to action being delivered again and again.

Mitch Winick:

And Jackie, as we prepared for this, you and I started talking about stories that we know people, we know examples of this kind of work, and the more we talked about it, the more excited we got about being able to highlight these type of achievements. You shared a couple stories with me. Share one of those with us.

Jackie Gardina:

I look back at a couple of things that happened while I was teaching in the classroom. So many law students want to come to law school because they want to be involved in change, and then they have to slog through three years of work and classes before they get to actually get involved. I actually was able to be involved in a situation among my first years of teaching. We had a student in one of my classes that approached me because he had lost his mom unexpectedly just a few months before law school. She had been blown up in a workplace explosion. One of the things that haunted him was that she had called him before she went to work that night, and he was in undergraduate school at the library and ignored her call and never picked it up. And he still was haunted by that, but he was also haunted by the fact that he felt like he couldn’t get justice for his mom, Ohio law, where his mom was born.

The workers’ compensation laws. There were so draconian that if any attorney attempted to bring a lawsuit against something covered by workers’ compensation, there was actually penalties involved. So no attorney would take his case and sue the gas company for negligence regarding his mom. So we gathered a bunch of students in the first year class and asked them if they wanted to be involved in helping him research the law and figure out how he could best promote a case on behalf of his mom. And we had students who did exactly that. We had professors come in to teach him about different points of law. They did the research. They helped the student write a memorandum that he could then send around to attorneys in Ohio explaining how they could win this case. He finally got an attorney to take the case. They sued, the company settled, and that student came back and set up a scholarship in his mom’s name at the law school. All of that was done through the work of people who are just beginning to get trained in legal thinking and legal structures. Yet they made an enormous difference, not just in that student’s life, but also in the student’s lives that were going to be affected by the scholarship going forward. So it was just a really wonderful example about how small efforts can bring big rewards.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie, that’s exactly the kind of story we’d like to highlight as we look into the next year’s episodes. As you know, I’m from Texas. I’ve brought that up on our program many a time. In fact, I think you’ve made fun of me a few times about my Texas roots, but I continue to watch what’s going on, particularly with the Dallas Bar Association and lawyers in Dallas. I was involved with that organization for almost two decades, and let me share an example that I read about with lawyers who were doing similar types of things. Fois Baam led the effort when Covid hit to redesign the Dallas Volunteer Attorney Program from an onsite free legal clinic to a digital program. If he hadn’t done that as we knew the same thing with our local clinics for your law school and our law school, that in-person clinics would’ve gone away. What he did in 2020 was reorganize those local free clinics to a digital format. They held over 283 virtual clinics holding at least one virtual clinic session every single week. They processed an unbelievable 16,000 applications and engaged more than 40 different law firms to participate. And they dealt with employment, landlord, tenant, family law, veterans services. I mean, this was a local attorney who decided to take their volunteer effort and step it up to redesign a local program and look at the impact.

Jackie Gardina:

And there’s people in not-for-profits in all of our communities that are doing that same day-to-day work to change the lives of people in our communities. And I think it’s so important to focus on what they’re doing and the impact they’re having, and hopefully inspire all of us to, in some small measure, take a step into our communities and ask what can we do to help?

Mitch Winick:

It’ll be very interesting, heartwarming, inspiring for us to look at these type of stories. I worry that some of us are concerned that the next several years may be dark with a lot of focus on the loss of rights, the loss of services, the loss of access to public aid. You and I have had a career in which we’ve focused on solutions to those problems, and I think this is the same thing. The opportunity to focus on solutions that are many times local, almost entirely volunteer and problem solving directly in the areas of law, humanitarian need, public policy and service. We look forward to featuring these stories over the next 12 months. As a reminder, our first two seasons of SideBar with issues and episodes related to constitutional law, individual rights and democracy remain available at www SideBar media.org and are also accessible on the Legal Talk Network. Spotify and Apple Podcasts, new episodes of SideBar, will continue to go live on the first and third Tuesdays of each month. Join us on January 7th, 2025 for the opening of season three of SideBar with Nisha Anand, chief executive officer of dream.org.

Jackie Gardina:

Once again, I want to thank everyone who joined us today on SideBar and as always, Mitch and I would love to know what’s on your mind. You can reach us at SideBar media.org.

Mitch Winick:

SideBar would not be possible without our producer, David Eakin, who composes and plays all of music you hear on SideBar. Thank you also to Dina Dowsett who creates and coordinates sidebar’s. Social media marketing.

Jackie Gardina:

Colleges of law and Monterey College of Law are part of a larger organization called California Accredited Law Schools. All of our schools are dedicated to providing access and opportunity to a legal education to marginalized communities.

Mitch Winick:

For more information about the California Accredited Law schools, go to ca law schools.org. That’s ca law schools.org.