Hi, my name is Schuyler Lamb. I am a junior at Mount Holyoke and an art history major. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how I spent this summer. This summer, I was working at Brooklyn Legal Services. A little bit about Brooklyn Legal Services, Brooklyn Legal Services is a 50-year-old organization that provides free legal advice and representation to residents of Brooklyn. 

They work in a wide range of legal practice areas, including housing, government benefits, employment, family, immigration, LGBTQ rights, and the rights of people with HIV. It has a staff of over 120, which includes attorneys, paralegals, and support staff. My unit was the LGBT and HIV advocacy unit. The LGBTQ and HIV unit represent LGBTQ and HIV-positive Brooklynites, and there were a ton of cases-- government benefit cases, asylum cases, and other immigration cases, and discrimination cases, among other things. 

So usually if you have a case and you fit into either of these categories, you would be sent to our unit, case loads permitting for all the lawyers there. It started out as an HIV unit during the AIDS crisis and only recently expanded into a broader LGBTQ unit. And as an HIV unit, it was primarily focused on government benefits and housing. 

So what I did, I did a bunch of different things. I'm going to talk to you about some of them. One of the things I did was I went to different courts and administrative agencies with attorneys, including housing court, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and federal district court. At the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, I was able to see a case where a transgender man was facing discrimination at work and was filing a lawsuit against his place of work. 

I also helped clients apply for a New York City rent freeze program for low-income, disabled, and senior citizens. What the program did was it would freeze people's rent, so that the rent would still go up but the city would pay the difference. So what I did there was I called clients who we currently had, and I saw if they were eligible. If they were eligible, we brought them in and filled out the application, made sure we had all of their paperwork, and sent it in to the department of finance. 

One of the more interesting things I did was I had to search public records for a case. We were trying to prove that our client had lived in his house at the same time his mother for a succession case. It was hard to kind of think about what was in the public domain that I could use to prove that they lived together. 

So I went to the New York Public Library. I went through all of the '90s phone books in Brooklyn in microfilm, printed about 40 pages, and that was actually used in discovery for that case. And then one of the main things I did was I researched country conditions. On my first day, I was like, they're probably going to have me photocopy something. And they're like, can you look up human rights violations in Kenya? And I was like, sure, sure. I'm definitely qualified for that. 

[LAUGHTER] 

But what you do for country conditions is it's for a asylum interview. You're presenting a list of sources that proves that that person is part of a particular social group that is unsafe in their home country. So for us, that was often people who were HIV-positive or who are LGBT. You would go look for things from the State Department and other human rights organizations as well as articles. 

And I was able to work closely with a man for Turkmenistan. He's actually my age. He had experienced a lot of violence in his home country and was applying for asylum. I was able to help get the country conditions ready and also put in his initial application for asylum. 

Anyway, what I took away from it-- so I did get a lot of experience researching and writing. I can find a Kenyan law for you in like 30 minutes flat. But another thing I got was an opportunity to look at the legal system. It wasn't a surprise that it's a very [INAUDIBLE] system that is set up for people to fail. 

But the question of the matter is you are guaranteed a lawyer for a criminal case but not for your other cases. And having a lawyer, it makes a huge difference in people's lives, whether it's in housing court-- having a lawyer can mean the difference between keeping your home and being evicted. 

With asylum cases, it's literally a life or death matter. And organizations are underfunded and understaffed. The LGBTQ immigration specialist in my office had over a hundred open cases and the marker for how many you're allowed to have at Brooklyn Legal Services is 40. So I came in interested in what I was going to do but I really developed a passion for it. And I'm hopefully going to go to law school, and I hope to work on LGBTQ immigration some day. 

[APPLAUSE]