Open Hands
Open Hands Legal Services
by Derek Reed
East Village — At 9:00 a.m. on the second Saturday of each month, a dozen volunteers gather on the second floor of a soup kitchen in Manhattan’s East Village. But they’re not here to dispense food to the people waiting in line outside. They’re lawyers, and they want to give people free legal advice.
Open Hands Legal Services is a non-profit that talks to people facing legal trouble and advises them about housing law, public benefits, criminal law, and immigration. Currently, the organization does not have the budget to represent clients itself, but if a person needs a lawyer, Open Hands points them in the right direction. “A lot of times, people get discouraged in going for legal aid, just because of the hoops that they have to jump through,” said Ime Imeh, the organization’s Executive Director.
The government offers many types of help at the federal, state, and local levels, but many people who need the aid either don’t know that it exists, or don’t know how to apply for it. Usually, people slip through the cracks for small reasons: a missing form, a forgotten appointment, or unclear directions to the offices where those appointments take place. “They can’t get in the door,” Imeh said. “So what we do is bring the services to the people.”
To do this, Open Hands partners with Father’s Heart ministries, which runs a soup kitchen in a church building on East 11th Street. The kitchen, located half a block away from the trendy bars and coffee shops that line Avenue A, is a story of its own.
At 9:30 a.m. each Saturday, Father’s Heart opens the doors of its chapel to the long line of people waiting on the sidewalk outside, beneath a cross-shaped neon sign that reads, “JESUS SAVES.” A worship band plays upbeat music on a stage at the head of the seafoam-green-colored room as volunteers line the entryway to create a gauntlet of high-fives and cheers for the people filing through the doors.
The guests, as Father’s Heart insists they be called, are seated at folding tables of eight, where they pass pots of coffee and juice amongst themselves. Conversation fills the room as volunteers play the role of waiter, swarming throughout the room to serve guests a breakfast of fresh eggs, potatoes, toast, and fruit. The operation looks almost chaotic to the casual observer, but it is a well-oiled machine. Father’s Heart serves 800 people in this way, each Saturday.
People come to Father’s Heart on Saturdays for a variety of reasons. Some are homeless, some are working poor, and some are elderly and on inadequate fixed incomes. Others are just lonely and looking for the company around breakfast tables.
When guests finish eating, they are given access to a variety of free social services, including an ESL class, a GED program, and the legal counseling offered by Open Hands. Open Hands sets up a desk on the stage downstairs. Velcroed to a wall is a sign for “Free Legal Advice.” Volunteers circle the room explaining various offered services.
Guests approach the desk for a preliminary interview, during which volunteers try to discern whether individuals’ have legal problems. Following the screening, guests whose problems can benefit from legal help are led upstairs to receive further counseling. Once upstairs, Father’s Heart’s guests become Open Hands’ clients.
“We may not be charging them $600 an hour, but we want to give them the same kind of service,” said Mark Chang, a third-year Seton Hall law student who has volunteered with the non-profit for more than a year. “We want to serve these people with the same kind of diligence we would give a corporation, or the mayor’s office.”
Upstairs, the Open Hands volunteers work in pairs, walking clients through the steps of a normal legal counseling session. Usually, the first step is simply flagging the issue. In many cases, people know that they need help but can’t describe their situation in legal terms, so before volunteers can aid them, they have to pinpoint what exactly the issue is.
Once the issue is flagged, volunteers connect clients with the resources appropriate to their situation. Sometimes it’s a referral to a homeless shelter; sometimes it’s a referral to someone who can represent them in court. Either way, it’s something that clients could overlook, trying to navigate the system for themselves.
Also, because legal trouble is usually connected to problems in other areas of life, counseling sessions usually lead to conversation about things like domestic strife, emotional health, and in some cases, suicide. “It creates the opportunity for us as Christians to not only minister to their physical needs,” Imeh said, “but also to deal with emotional, mental health, and homelessness issues.”
Sometimes clients’ problems can be solved during the session, and sometimes they can’t. Volunteers have built relationships with former clients who return to Father’s Heart not because they need additional assistance, but to update volunteers on how things are going. Even when clients’ issues can’t be resolved, volunteers offer to stay with them as long as they need, to encourage them and pray with them.
In the pre-session huddle, Deputy Director of Spiritual Outreach, Paul Clewell, reminded the gathered volunteers of 1 Corinthians 13:4. “We can’t solve all of their problems,” he said. “But we can be patient, we can be kind.”
In addition to serving at Father’s Heart, Open Hands also tries to encourage Christian lawyers to consider making poverty law their main practice. “I worked as a lawyer for nine years before I found another Christian who worked in the legal services field,” Imeh said.
Currently, the organization is staffed almost exclusively by volunteers, a group that numbers around 80 people. Open Hands’ only two paid employees are Imeh and Sandy Stefanski, the Program Coordinator, each of whom works one day a week.
Open Hands pulls its volunteers from all levels and areas of the law profession. Among those who serve are practicing attorneys and paralegals, as well as law students looking for practical experience while still in school.
Because lawyers with experience in poverty law are few and far between, Open Hands requires its volunteers to go through an extensive training course before manning the help desk. Haejin Shim is a litigator for London Fischer LLP who, in addition to volunteering at the legal desk, also serves on Open Hands’ board. “Law is so vast that, unless you practice in that area, you can’t do it,” she said. “That’s why it’s called practice.”
In training, volunteers are briefed on the solutions and options for the types of issues that most often come up at the desk—which, most frequently, involve housing rights, public benefits, immigration, or homelessness. The training sessions happen twice per year, and they are open to anyone wishing to join.
Shim remembers her first time volunteering at the help desk. “I was nervous because I didn’t practice in this area,” she said. “But on my way home, I had this joy. This amazing heavenly joy.” The next day, Shim called Open Hands. “I joined the board. I told them, ‘Just tell me what to do.’” Shim said Open Hands is unique among legal aid organizations because of the community that has formed among its volunteers. Volunteers have become friends outside of their time of service, and they keep up with one another throughout the week.
“We’ve formed this family,” Shim said. “That’s why I think we’ve built such a consistent base of volunteers.”
On Saturday, there were seven consultations going on at once, around long folding tables in the open room that Open Hands shares with the GED program. People waiting for their consultation sat in chairs by the staircase, and Imeh—the only person in the room whose primary practice is poverty law—was positioned in the corner with her laptop. Volunteers walked over to seek her advice when stumped by their clients’ cases.
The kitchen downstairs wrapped up around 11:00 a.m., but some of Open Hands’ sessions ran more than half an hour later. “We don’t rush sessions,” Imeh said. “If it goes over time, everything is closed downstairs, and we’re still praying and talking with people, that’s fine.”
During the next five years, Open Hands hopes to raise funds to start representing clients in court. They also are looking to expand their help desk model into other parts of the city.
The organization gets its name from Deuteronomy 15:11, which says, “There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be open-handed toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy.” Imeh recognizes that the first half of that verse states that the need for Open Hands’ services will always be present.
“You realize that what you have to give is so miniscule in light of the need,” she said. “You give what you have and you hope that even if you’re just meeting the need of one person, that will reverberate like a wave. We’re doing what we can and hoping that God will do the rest.”
