Hi, everybody.
My name's Morgan Flanagan Folcarelli.
And this summer, I had the opportunity
to work with New York Lawyers For the Public Interest, which
is a nonprofit law firm based out of New York City.
So first of all, to start off, NYLPI has four main divisions.
They have disability, justice, environmental justice,
health justice, and pro bono clearing house section.
And I was an intern at the pro bono clearing house.
So pro bono clearing house works to source
nonprofit organizations and community
organizations with legal aid from the private bar for free.
It's really a great opportunity.
They do some really great work, interact with a lot of really
fantastic organizations.
As the clearing house intern, a lot of my responsibilities
were administrative.
So I was responsible for emailing attorneys,
and clients, and checking in about how cases we placed
were going, and compiling weekly reports
to take back to my team.
And it was a really fantastic experience,
just because I had not previously
done this type of work before, and it's
something that is really critical to any office
scenario, whether it's nonprofits or not.
So I was very grateful for that opportunity.
But really, the highlight of my internship
was not the work that I was doing, as much as observing
the dynamics of my office.
And I observed these in three primary ways.
One was the emphasis on self care.
And then second was the emphasis on creating a positive office
community, and the third was the ability
that the office provided to both myself and my fellow interns,
as well as everybody who was employed there
to have difficult conversations, and really
challenge each other, and think about things.
So in terms of self-care, one thing
that I'm sure any of you who have worked in nonprofits
or who have experienced public service work
will know that kind of plague of the nonprofit sector
is burnout.
It's very challenging work.
There are both, as my [INAUDIBLE] have mentioned,
really difficult cases, really difficult stories you're
hearing, as well as just the fact
that many of these organizations are understaffed.
There just aren't enough people trying to solve these problems
or to help others.
So that can also lead to really toxic work environments,
even in some of the nonprofits that
are trying to do the best work.
So these were things that I had in the back of my mind,
going into this internship, thinking
what I might be asked to do, what that might be like for me
as an intern.
But my organization really surprised me,
in that I did not experience many of these things I thought
I would.
At NYLPI, from our first day, we were told,
you have an hour lunch break.
Take it.
Don't sit at your desk.
Go outside.
Really have that kind of separation
from doing your work.
Don't work through lunch.
So many people in the office ate together.
The interns ended up going to a park
nearby to eat lunch, which was a really wonderful thing.
And that just is one surprising instance.
A second was that we were told at 6:00 PM,
they wanted us gone.
They did not want us working late.
Really, if you had something that you
didn't finish that day, just come back to it the next day.
So it was a really positive rhetoric about finishing work,
and how you applied yourself, and not
biting off more than you could chew.
We were also really encouraged to ask questions, which
I think you generally hear in an internship,
but I found to be particularly true in my internship,
that the people that I spoke to would often say, "Come back
to me, if you have any follow up,"
and were very great about that.
The second thing that I really noticed
was the emphasis on fostering a positive community,
because it really is important to cultivate
these positive relationships in an office to both make it
a safe and enjoyable space to be in when
you're doing challenging work.
And so there are many ways that this was done.
There was a monthly newsletter that came out,
called The NYLPI Nibbler, which was basically a satire piece.
There were some mock interviews of some of my colleagues.
There were silly little anecdotes.
It was just a fun thing to get in your office email.
We also had an office picnic and an office bake-off.
So we had the day off for the office picnic.
It was hosted by the director at his home.
Everyone was invited.
The bake-off was this fun little competition
that was held in the middle of the day.
I won two awards for that. [INAUDIBLE].
But it was just this fun, lighthearted thing.
And there were many instances that these lighthearted moments
[INAUDIBLE] talks into otherwise very challenging, very draining
work.
We also had several happy hours where at 4:00 PM,
the office manager would come on over the loudspeaker and say,
"All right, everybody.
Pack up your stuff.
It's time to go," and we would all just head out together.
So there was this emphasis on fostering community, which
I thought was really fantastic.
An additional dynamic that I hadn't mentioned yet
was that of gender.
So my first day in the office, I noticed
that in this office of about 30 plus people,
there were only five to six men.
The majority of my colleagues were women,
and all of the other interns were women.
And I was, at first, surprised about this.
But I ended up discovering that that's a very common feature
of public service work.
It is a very much women driven industry.
And one of the challenging things
that ended up coming up in terms of this and leading to this
was the externship program that my organization has.
We bring in externs from some of the big law offices
to work for a couple of weeks.
And we had one extern in particular,
who was a 30-year-old man, who really just rubbed
a lot of the people in my office wrong,
and illustrated to me many of the misconceptions
about public service work that especially came out, in terms
of my law student friends.
He would ask questions like, what
big law firms did you apply to?
And then was surprised to find out that actually, they'd
wanted to do public service work, with the assumption
that maybe they'd been rejected from some of the firms
that they'd applied to, because there is this strong, really
not accurate idea that people who end up in public service
are there because they don't have the grades or the stamina
to do big law.
So that has its own negative connotations
about public service work, and why you would be motivated
to do that, and the importance.
But it also has a lot of really negative connotations
about women, because as women tend
to fill these positions more, there's
this idea that women's just aren't
strong enough or smart enough to do this big law,
rather than just realizing that this work needs to be done.
A lot of people are passionate about it.
So I was able to have conversations with my intern
friend about how this wasn't just an idea
perpetuated by this extern.
It was something that a lot of them got at law school too.
And I would have had no clue, if I
hadn't had these conversations, wouldn't have been able to have
this understanding of many of the difficulties
that one faces, especially when you're planning
to go into public service work, and also
being in the environment that I was,
where there was a lot of emphasis
on understanding your own abilities,
and also knowing that what you're doing is important,
and taking care of yourself that we were
able to have these experiences with this extern,
and to be confronted with these misconceptions,
but also rise above them and realize that actually, this
was an office full of smart, passionate,
driven women who did not need a 30-something year old man
to tell us that we weren't smart enough to work in big law.
So it was just an incredible experience
and really taught me that there's
a lot more behind the scenes, other than just the work
that you're doing that goes into how you operate,
that goes into what you do and how you
live as a person doing that.
So I had not really realized how important
the office dynamic was, until I had this internship.
But I'm so grateful that I was able to work with New York
Lawyers of Public Interest, and it's definitely
inspired me to continue looking at public service a lot.
So thank you very much.