“Stay home.” “Stay safe.” These are the tag lines to every conversation I have with friends, with colleagues, with loved ones. But for many Atlantans, home is anything but safe.

When the calendar flipped to January 2019, I was wringing my hands thinking about our fundraising goal of over $4,000,000.

So often, I get busy and distracted and I forget to offer even a simple “thank you.” Thanksgiving, however, is dedicated to a singular focus: gratitude.

Our anonymous donor and all of the contributors to the SAFE Fund have done nothing less than re-make the future of our work. 

Executive Director Marty Ellin discusses major milestones at Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation—and why this work remains relevant.

Executive Director Marty Ellin reflects on the Jewish tradition of Tikkun Olam – acts of kindness performed to “heal the world.”

When it is time to stand with a nonprofit friend who needs help from the breadth of your law firm, how do you build a team that will respond with previously unknown generosity and excitement?

We already miss Liz terribly – she was absolutely one-of-a-kind. The kind the legal community, and the larger community, needed more of, the kind of lawyer who made equal access to justice more than just a catch-phrase, and the kind of person that caused Judge Jane Barwick to write this about what her friend Liz Whipple taught her: “That one person, one curly-headed person, can make all others better. And heartbroken.“

More often than I wish were true, people think of “pro bono legal services” as simply giving a poor person a free lawyer. But pro bono publico (usually shortened to pro bono) does not mean “free,” it means “for the public good.”

I am a father before all else, and how I view everything in the world is shaped by this. 

So in the days after men were murdered for the uniform they wore, following hard on men being murdered for the skin they wore, it was especially difficult to hear the pain of my daughters asking, “Dad, what can we do?”

Safety. And Stability.

If there is a way to condense what the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation means to those in our community who depend on AVLF for access to a lawyer, it might be those two words.

I offer these words not to add my voice to the swell of candidates’ screams about how we make our nation more secure. But I do urge that while the larger questions play out, there is much that we, the staff of AVLF, and you, the volunteers, donors, and supporters of the Foundation have done and can do, every day, to enhance the places we live, which in turn makes us a more just and more peaceful society.