Empowering Young People to Reach Their Potential with Cathy Sakimura

Episode Notes

Transcript

Cathy Sakimura:

I think one of the silver linings of times of darkness and challenge is the amazing people who step forward at their own personal risk, sometimes to their own detriment, to be there to support others because I think that’s really truly who we are as a community and who we should be is being there to care for each other, to care about each other and to be willing to fight on behalf of others who aren’t able to do so.

Announcer:

That’s our guest today on SideBar. Cathy Sakimura, executive director of Legal Services for Children. 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. Welcome to SideBar featuring conversations about optimism in action with Lawyers in Leaders Inspiring Change. And now your co-hosts Jackie Gardina and Mitch Winick.

Jackie Gardina:

Welcome back to SideBar everyone. Mitch and I are excited to continue our focus on individuals who are making a difference in their communities, what we call optimism in action, something we all need to hear about right now. And this week we’re joined by Cathy Sakimura. She’s the executive director of Legal Services for Children in San Francisco and she has spent her entire professional life advocating for children. Those who are unable to advocate for themselves and quite honestly often don’t have adults in their life who are able to do it for them either. Cathy, we’re excited to hear your story and about the work you do. Welcome to SideBar.

Cathy Sakimura:

Thank you so much. I’m happy to be here.

Mitch Winick:

Cathy, we see that you’ve had a career in public service. You worked first in L-G-B-T-Q rights, now you’re working with children’s rights. You obviously like challenging, difficult issues. Tell us about what drew you into this type of work. How did this happen?

Cathy Sakimura:

Yeah, I feel like in many ways just my interest in making sure that children and families are able to thrive is a big part of what motivated me to get into public interest to begin with. My mother is a special education teacher and my older sister is a pediatrician and we just always had a lot of focus on children and families and the importance of children feeling supported and having a voice and families having the supports that they needed to thrive and that led me to doing family law work with LGBT families originally, which was the first part of my career. I had an amazing experience doing litigation and policy and legislative work to keep families together and also working on child welfare issues that impact LGBT families really in many ways I was driven to the way I did that work of caning a child’s perspective in family law.

What children see, who children see as their families I think is very important. So when children see who children see as their parents, who children see as their loved ones and having the ability to be supported and be with those people, I found to be really important in part because I actually was a law student intern at Legal Services for Children when I was in law school and it really inspired me to think about children and youth’s rights from the perspective of what they believe they want for themselves, for their futures and for their families, and that’s really the driving force of what legal Services for children has always done.

Jackie Gardina:

One of the things that fascinates me about the organization, I have a master’s in social work and I did outpatient clinical therapy with kids and families for several years before I went to law school and one of the reasons I went to law school is I felt like I was bandaging kids up and sending them back into a system that was broken and what your organization does is actually combine social work or mental health care and systemic change with the legal services. Can you talk a little bit about how you integrate both that medical and legal

Cathy Sakimura:

Piece? Absolutely. We think that when children need a lawyer, it’s usually because there’s a crisis or a trauma in their lives and we believe that they can’t just be served by solving their legal problem. If you take a child who’s experienced trauma, who’s in crisis and you solve the legal problem that they may have, they’re not really set up to thrive. You need to address their other needs holistically. So that’s why we pair clinical social workers who can do case management, who can look to the child’s mental health needs, help them achieve their goals beyond just the legal goals they may have really sets them up for success. So if a child can’t live with their parents and they are seeking a guardianship, they need the legal help to get that person to be their legal guardian, to be able to care for them, but also clinical social workers to help them obtain mental health services, to have therapy, to find a new doctor if they’ve moved to enter a new school, enter into the kind of afterschool activities that they want to be part of and think about where they want to be after school, get ready to think about college or of career, all the things that young people need to start preparing themselves to thrive in adulthood.

It’s very important that that gets addressed at that time and that they can be on a path to success.

Mitch Winick:

Cathy, how do you get word out for these types of services? Because my daughter also works in your field. She’s about to get her master’s in marriage and family counseling. She’s worked in residential centers where these were children, they were trying to transition into being foster able, just the hardest of the heartbreaking. How do you get that message out and how do you get it out early enough so that it can in some cases avoid those circumstances?

Cathy Sakimura:

Well, we have a lot of wonderful partners at medical and mental health facilities and other services that serve youth in other ways and children who contact us if they have a young person who may need our services. We also have close relationships with schools and many of our social workers and advocates and attorneys will go into schools and do presentations of understanding your rights and do clinics and intake at schools with young people who may be experiencing challenges. We also have close relationship of course, and work with the programs that support foster youth in San Francisco. Our attorneys are one of the attorneys that represent children who are in foster care in San Francisco, and so the court also assigns us to represent children and then they can access other services as well. The last thing I want to point out is that we also serve immigrant children and both immigrant children who are in the community who are undocumented, and then we also serve children who are in detention by themselves. So children who’ve come to the country without their parents who end up in detention alone, we are go into the detention facilities and meet with every child in the local detention facilities and provide them with services both from social workers and attorneys.

Jackie Gardina:

I want to put that in context For listeners who may not be familiar with the immigration system and detention, how is it that you’re alerted that there’s a child in detention given that there’s no right to counsel or anything like that?

Cathy Sakimura:

So right now we’re fortunate to have a contract with the federal government that under the contract we serve every child who comes into certain detention facilities, and with that we are able to have access to a certain amount of records, of least when children are coming into the facilities so that we can go in as soon as they arrive and meet with them and have a social worker meet with them and find out what their needs are. Do they have a legal claim also to look at do they have what they need in those facilities? Do they have family? A lot of what we do is to try to see if they do have family in the United States that we can find who can take care of them

Jackie Gardina:

Well, and I noticed that you do use private funding or philanthropy, but you also do have federal funding and obviously through contracts like this or other types of grants. Given the current situation at the national level with the freezing of federal funds and the shift in immigration policy, is there a risk that your organization is going to lose access to that funding and the ability to help these children?

Cathy Sakimura:

Absolutely. It has been a concern that we were in a group of contracts that was slated for review that could have been frozen and we’ve not been sure if or when that would happen. Both the funding to serve the children as well as the access to be able to know that they have come into the facilities to come in and be able to meet with every child to see what kind of services can be provided. We didn’t know and still don’t know how that may be impacted. So of course we do also have very generous private donors from foundations and individuals and we are seeking additional funding to help make sure that even if we lose that federal funding, we can continue to serve these children who in this time of a lot of change and a lot of hostility toward immigrants are experiencing even more fear and trauma beyond the fear and trauma that led them to their journeys here by themselves.

Mitch Winick:

Okay. Cathy, I’m going to do a baldfaced sales job for you because I absolutely believe that we all need to be very conscious of the risk that some of this funding could be limited or could go away and the private sector needs to step up. That’s all of us. The private sector is not just foundations and others, that’s all of us. Tell us how someone would get in touch with your organization if they’re sitting there with a hot checkbook and they have now been convinced that they want to support legal services for children.

Jackie Gardina:

I just want to point out first that Mitch has dated himself terribly by saying a hot checkbook.

Mitch Winick:

Okay. They could probably Venmo or PayPal or something else as well. I bet.

Jackie Gardina:

Yeah. So we’ll let Cathy fill in the various options available to people to donate to Legal Services for children.

Cathy Sakimura:

Absolutely. There’s many ways to donate to us if you search for legal services for children. We are the one in San Francisco. There are some others that have other in other locations. Our web address is lsc Legal Services for children sf.org San Francisco, and we’re based in San Francisco. There are many ways to donate on our website there. You can also find us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. We have pages there if you just search for legal services for children and ways to donate that way as well. And it’s absolutely true, even when the government is providing funding to serve children, it’s never enough to meet the need even when there isn’t a risk of losing it. And we depend on the generosity and the partnership of the private sector and the public sector, which is individuals and foundations who believe that no child should be without a family, without support, without mental health services after experiencing trauma, and that they should be supported in ways that will help them be successful adults.

Jackie Gardina:

Like so many of the guests on this show, I went to law school because I wanted the tools to create change. If you have that same passion and you want to develop the necessary skills and knowledge in a nurturing environment built for working adults, join us at Colleges of Law with both in-person and online learning options. Take the first step to building a better future for you and your community@collegesoflaw.edu.

Mitch Winick:

So Cathy, you guys have been obviously successful in San Francisco, a large city. We have listeners all over the country. Let’s say there’s someone in a community that says, dad gammit, we need something like this. We desperately need this type of a service to help us. How would they go about getting started if you were being called as an advisor to someone in another city? They say, we love what you do, we want one too, but we don’t know how to start.

Cathy Sakimura:

Absolutely. Well, there are children’s law offices throughout the country in various places, however, they’re not always able to serve the breadth of issues and the community that we serve, many of them are focused, for example, just on serving youth in foster care in part because of the resources that they have available to them. If you can get the resources to support a broad range of issues that children face, then working with the existing offices you have to expand those services I think would be a wonderful place to start because they already have wonderful attorneys and social workers working with young people, but may not have the resources to do so in all the areas where children actually face challenges.

Mitch Winick:

So it sounds like it’s a combination of individuals, so the social work community, the professional social work organizations, it’s also going to involve local lawyers. Sounds like you need to have them so the local bar association may have a group or should consider having a group that could help on this and then engagement with certain public agencies. To me it sounds kind of complicated, but what would you say to that is don’t be put off by that, just start the steps along the way.

Cathy Sakimura:

Absolutely. I think there are so many wonderful service organizations that were started by people who had a dream to serve a part of the community that they saw wasn’t being served, who had a desperate need for support. And it can be challenging to find funding to set it up to get the right people involved. And that’s what the kind of passion to achieve that and overcome those challenges is what has led to the amazing community services that we have. No one really starts these things alone. Once you have this idea about what you can do, you’ll find others who support that as well and who’ll have different skills and can come together and help you create that. And it is a lot of work to start such an organization or such a task to do so. But once you get going, the impact can have is so tremendous.

Jackie Gardina:

Cathy, one of the things that I know is true for me is I have people that have been a part of my journey that have left an impact and it’s like that’s why I do this work. Is there a particular story or narrative that stands out for you that you use as your beacon to say, this is why I do this work?

Cathy Sakimura:

I think it’s a couple of different things. First, I would say in my early in my career meeting child advocates who truly had this vision of serving young people in a way that’s authentic to the young person’s goals, whether or not we might think they’re the best goals or the easiest to achieve that, that was not only a way to achieve their goals, but a way to get them started in thinking and being prepared to be an adult who has to make their own decisions and that young people are often not given the power to make decisions for themselves, and that’s really hard. It can feel really like you don’t have control over your life and that especially when you’re going through trauma or crisis or don’t have a caring adult to support you in your life, really can make it hard to succeed even in the things that might be attainable to you.

And so I think just meeting child advocates. When I was first doing the work that I did, even before I became a lawyer, I did youth organizing and is how I met some attorneys doing organizing work and representing children and thinking about, I never thought about lawyers as being drivers of social change when I was growing up. I didn’t know that much about being a lawyer and learning that there were lawyers who could use the law to allow young people to have a voice in what they wanted their lives to be was a really impactful moment for me to see that there are these ways that we can use the power of the law to give a voice to young people. And I will say in my early career, one of my earliest cases just was a very long and drawn out and challenging case where a child had been separated from her mother and when we eventually were able to reunite them was just this incredible moment of feeling the power of even when things don’t feel insurmountable, even when things feel insurmountable, that through the perseverance of your clients and their families and your work that you can bring people together with the power of the law was this amazing moment.

And I think about that. That’s what we’re trying to do is to help people who have been separated by the law or other challenges to be together, to have supports and for young people to have safe homes. We had a young person who recently got a green card who came to this country by himself and we worked with him for many years. He was very sick and had to have significant medical care and was recently able to receive a kidney transplant and be able to get his green card and be able to be successful as an adult. And really just seeing the time over years of working with a young person who then becomes an adult and is able to care for themselves and get a job, go to college is just an incredible experience.

Mitch Winick:

Let me ask an impossible question as I’m listening to this. I just sense this divided responsibility. On one hand, there’s a responsibility to the community and we would like to think that the community feels an obligation to its children and that’s where you would go for support. On the other hand, the reality of this is many of these programs cannot survive or thrive without government funding public funding. It seems to me that that’s just an inherent tension. Is this the job of the government or is this the job of the community and the faith-based community and the other volunteers? My guess is you struggle with that as you create your strategies for your organization to survive as well. What are your thoughts on that?

Cathy Sakimura:

Well, I think it’s all of our responsibility. The government is us and the government is tasked to take our resources and our taxes to serve the public good, to support all of us. And we all have an obligation to the children in our communities to make sure that they’re safe and healthy and it is the job of a government to use our resources to support children who don’t have others to support them. It’s also our community obligation and the obligations of our families. And we all really, if we’re going to exist in a society, have to take care of our children and make sure that they have the opportunities to be safe, healthy, to grow up, to learn, to choose their path, and to be able to be successful adults.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie, I want to take a moment to reflect that as we’re talking about optimism and action. Many of our guests say that they first started thinking about a career in public service while they were still in law school. And schools like yours and mine, Monterey College of Law provide an affordable, convenient way for working adults to attend law school and pursue these interests. Classes are taught by practicing lawyers and judges who prepare our students to serve their community in many of the same areas that we are discussing here on SideBar. For more information, go to monterey law.edu.

Jackie Gardina:

I love the focus on the public good because I think sometimes that gets lost in the current debate. I want to talk about the private effect of the work that you do. One of the things we’ve been focusing on with law students, and I think it’s becoming more of a norm in the legal profession, is wellbeing. You’re working with kids who have been through an incredible amount of trauma you’re working with inside a system that isn’t always working at its best or in the best interest of those youth. What do you do and what do your coworkers do to take care of themselves to allow them to sustain the work that they’re doing?

Cathy Sakimura:

A wonderful question because of course, our social workers and attorneys and advocates are working with young people who’ve experienced extreme trauma, children who’ve been trafficked, children who have been abused or neglected, abandoned, have experienced extreme violence. And even just to pursue their cases typically involves making that child or young person tell you about what happened to them, which is difficult for that child and for you to hear and make them relive it and tell you about it. And that can be really hard. And I think that’s one reason why comparing social workers and attorneys and advocates is such a wonderful way to approach this work is that they can support each other. The social workers remind us attorneys that we need to think about our own mental health and how we are taking in these stories as well as helping us approach that work in a trauma-informed and healing centered way that if you do have to talk to a young person about an extreme trauma they’ve experienced, how can you do it in a way that can help them on a path toward healing? And really, I think has helped our legal representation be designed not just to achieve the legal goal, but help that young person start their path toward healing.

Jackie Gardina:

One follow up question, and I have to admit this is probably more personal than for our listeners, which is you worked for many years as part of the LGBT work to further the unification of gay and lesbian families, et cetera. How are you handling what appears to be two steps forward? It may be five steps back. What are you doing to maintain your hopefulness and your push to make sure that what you worked for is maintained or at least not completely lost?

Cathy Sakimura:

It has been very difficult to see not only what’s happening to immigrant children and families under current new policies and hostility toward them, but particularly attacks on transgender people and transgender children. And much of my work was on behalf of transgender children, both for them to be with their families, to be supported, to have healthcare, be able to school and sports. And it is really hard to see the denial of their personhood, the attempts to prevent their participation in daily life and knowing and having worked with so many transgender children and knowing the harms that they experience in just being able to have any kind of support or affirmation that they are worthy human beings, that they have just as much right to attend school and sports and have friends as any other child, really showed me how important it is to just allow young people to go through their journey as is important to them.

Because if we try to change who they are, they’re not going to be able to be happy adults and to be successful adults in society. I think it has been really hard to see that backsliding. I’ve been in touch with many of my colleagues and friends who are still doing this work, and it is challenging to be working with transgender children and families with transgender children right now because of the fear that’s out there and all the changes and hospitals denying care, and it has been really difficult. But I also see so many people who I have worked with for years fighting to stop this change to help support people. I think one of the silver linings of times of darkness and challenge is the amazing people who step forward at their own personal risk, sometimes to their own detriment, to be there to support others because I think that’s really truly who we are as a community and who we should be is being there to care for each other, to care about each other and to be willing to fight on behalf of others who aren’t able to do so.

Mitch Winick:

Cathy, that’s exactly the type of messaging we hope to expand with this season three of SideBar on optimism and action. And despite these incredible challenges, you fulfill that goal of being optimistic and taking action. So Cathy, what’s next for your organization? Obviously these challenges don’t go away. What do you see on the horizon as your next challenges, your next opportunities?

Cathy Sakimura:

Absolutely. I think we’re seeing a greater community need than ever from young people, particularly from immigrant children and newcomer immigrant children who are here by themselves really needing our support and that we could be serving so many more children even in San Francisco. We have to turn children away because we do not have enough staff to represent everyone. And I think there’s an incredible possibility to grow this work to serve more children in San Francisco, the Bay Area and beyond. And I know that’s also true for other organizations working across the country, that there are more children in crisis than we’re able to serve, and that we have an amazing model that supports them than invests in children. I think that when you think about a child in crisis needing legal services, it’s important to think about the work we do with them is an investment in their future and their success and that doing so can change the trajectory of their lives.

Jackie Gardina:

Cathy, I think one of the things that comes out very strongly in speaking with you is the importance of stepping back from the demonization of groups and reminding ourselves to see them as individuals, human beings who are trying to fulfill and live their best lives, especially the children that come to the United States or those who are struggling with gender dysphoria, whatever the case may be, that we need to step back and really experience the human aspect of it. And you talked a lot about how it helps the youth find their way and get on their journey and become happy adults. Ultimately though, that has a great societal impact and it’s not just about the individual child, but it goes back to that public good. It’s why we want government investing in kids because we think that raising them in a particular environment and allowing them to thrive is good for all of us, and I really appreciate the work that your organization is doing and all those across the country that are engaged in this type of work. And I appreciate you coming to tell your story.

Cathy Sakimura:

Thank you for having me, and thank you for sharing that perspective too, because it is really not just important for the young people we serve, but for all of us to help young people become thriving adults because that’s how they can be productive members of society and our community. And we also see that the young people we work with as they become adults, they’re not just supporting themselves, they’re also have learned through working with us the value of helping others. And many of the young people we work with go on to careers or professions that help others and that become an incredible support within their communities and really are able to do so much more for others than they needed themselves.

Mitch Winick:

Cathy, thank you for the work you’re doing and thank you for the work of Legal Services for Children.

Cathy Sakimura:

Thank you so much,

Mitch Winick:

Jackie. I think interviewing Cathy Sakimura and Legal Services for Children is great timing because it’s so important for us to remember that these types of organizations and this type of work that are essential to protecting children, particularly children at great risk are just critical. Critical. And I fear that they get lost in the shuffle. So I’m pleased that we’re able to call attention to this good work.

Jackie Gardina:

Mitch? I agree. I think one of the things that I’ve really loved about the stories that we’ve done this season is I do feel hopeful after we’re done talking to them. It’s been such a challenging beginning to 2025, and to have this little piece of sunlight shine on the work that we do to say what happens out there matters. There’s people out there that are helping push the boulder up the hill and are succeeding. Even if the boulder falls back down, there’s going to be a group of people that are going to push it back up again. So it’s just so important to know that there’s people that are doing that work day in and day out. Cathy and the organization that she leads is just one example of the type of work that’s being done in communities across the country to support our most vulnerable populations. 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 the music you hear on SideBar. Thank you also to Dina Dowsett who creates and coordinates sidebars. 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.

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