Tennessee Bar Association Public Service Awards

Each year the Tennessee Bar Association recognizes outstanding service by attorneys and law students who have dedicated their time to help others. The awards given are the Harris Gilbert Pro Bono Volunteer of the Year, the Ashley T. Wiltshire Public Service Attorney of the Year and the Law Student Volunteer of the Year. Read the stories of those recognized here.

Harris Gilbert Pro Bono Volunteer of the Year

This year’s Harris Gilbert award is presented to REBECCA McKELVEY CASTAñEDA. The award recognizes private attorneys who have contributed significant amounts of pro bono work and have demonstrated dedication to the development and delivery of legal services to the poor. The award is named after Gilbert, a Nashville attorney and past Tennessee Bar Association president, who exemplifies this type of commitment.

Seeds of public service and compassion sewn on a farm near Manchester took deep root in Rebecca McKelvey Castañeda. Those ideals, instilled by her farmer parents and nurtured by faith and a belief in social justice, have today guided Castañeda into a successful career at Stites and Harbison PLLC and also into very demanding pro bono work.

Her efforts this year stand out because of both the quantity of time she gives and the expertise she brings to those in need. In two such cases, Stites colleague Alex MacKay writes in her nomination, Castañeda devoted close to 300 hours of time.

“Representation in both cases required a commitment of time over the course of many months and knowledge of niche areas of the law,” MacKay wrote.

Castañeda’s practice focuses primarily on domestic relations, but it is her expertise in Hague Convention international child abduction cases that she has recently put to use assisting those in need.

“International family law really is a specialty area,” Castañeda, 33, says, “so even a lot of family lawyers have not practiced in the area.” Because of her presence on the International Child Abduction Attorney Network, she is often contacted by those in need who do not qualify for legal aid and cannot afford an attorney.

One such case involved an unaccompanied minor being detained by Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE). Working with the University of Tennessee School of Law’s Karla McKanders and MacKay, Castañeda was able to represent the child in juvenile court and ultimately earn him special immigrant juvenile status.

“Rebecca worked hard to overcome the cultural differences,” MacKay wrote. “Explaining to a minor from another country who has had limited education how the state juvenile court and the federal immigration court interact, and how they are both relevant to his ability to achieve his goals is itself a major feat.”

Castañeda is quick to credit the work of others in her successes and also quick to note the support of colleagues at Stites. The firm’s commitment to pro bono and public service is one of the reasons that she is working there, she says.

“Charlie Warfield, a founder of our firm, set a great example of why pro bono is a good thing for the legal community and for Nashville,” she said. “Mr. Warfield and Mr. (Harris) Gilbert used to set up shop at the courthouse one day every week to help people [in need] who had legal needs.”

On a day-to-day basis, Castañeda says she benefits from the advice of colleagues such as Gregory Smith, Miranda Christy, MacKay and others who balance the demands of a successful practice with their public service commitment.

“Greg is a good example of someone who makes sure to fit in pro bono even with a thriving practice,” she says. “So I have great people right down the hall to learn from.”

Keeping that balance is likely even tougher this year. Along with her pro bono work, Castañeda has also taken on a leadership role with the non-profit Tennessee Justice Center, beginning a two-year term as its board chair.

Her contributions there are also tied to her childhood and her desire to give back to those who have helped her.

“My dad was a fulltime farmer, so as a child I was served by TennCare,” she says. “I appreciated that it was available to me, so I feel I owe it to give thanks back for the opportunity given me.”

That drive to give back and to ensure other children have the same chance to grow up healthy and secure guides her work both at the TJC and in pro bono child abduction cases.

And while she has always had her own life experiences to draw on for motivation, the newlywed now has another source of inspiration in her life: her husband, David Castañeda. Like some of her clients from third-world countries, Castañeda grew up in a poor village in South America. He worked hard to build a better life, first earning an engineering degree, then taking weekly 18-hour bus trips from his work in a gold mine to Lima, Peru, where he studied for the GMAT test. Success on that brought him to Vanderbilt University where the pair met and later fell in love.

— Barry Kolar

Ashley T. Wiltshire Public Service Attorney of the Year

The Public Service Award is given to an attorney who has provided dedicated and outstanding service while employed by an organization that is primarily engaged in providing legal representation to the poor. This year’s award is given to MICHELE JOHNSON.

Michele Johnson says she “always wanted to be a mix of Helen Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan, and Perry Mason.” A short time spent with this energetic, passionate executive director of the Tennessee Justice Center (TJC) reveals that if she hasn’t achieved it, she has come mighty close.

Johnson came up with her goal after a providential conversation with her father when she was in the third grade. She had been arguing with some of her five siblings when in exasperation he said, “You need to be a lawyer.” When she asked what a lawyer did, he told her: “They argue for people who can’t argue for themselves.”

Johnson had already started to notice that there were people who couldn’t argue for themselves, some in her own extended family. Her aunt “was separated from the community because of her disability, until she came to live with us in her 60s,” she says. She also recalls twin cousins who were born blind and with developmental delays, who had to be institutionalized. On the ride back from leaving them after a visit, six-year-old Michele listened to the painful crying and wailing of the adults in the car, who felt there was no choice, if the children were to get appropriate health care, but to take them to the facility, where they later died.

“I knew I wanted to make sure that I played my part in making sure everyone is included,” she says now. “I was blessed to see it and learn those lessons.” The work she does today, advocating for those who can’t argue for themselves at the TJC is a natural extension.

“I’m from a big Catholic family,” she says about her life growing up in Nashville. “I have always been surrounded by the lesson that everybody matters and it’s our job to make it so.” Her father informed her life decisions in many ways, even at the end of his life when taking 21 medications for eight chronic illnesses. “I knew how important health care was because I spent a lot of time in the hospital with him,” she says. “It made him incredibly compassionate with others. It made him look at the world from the view of someone who had no power.”

Johnson formed the TJC in 1996 along with Gordon Bonnyman, who stepped down last year as executive director, a title Johnson now holds. Bonnyman is still a part of the organization as a staff attorney. They started TJC together (she served as managing attorney then), and she points out that at the time he had been a lawyer for 20 years and she was not too long out of law school. Her experience to that point was a year and a half at the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee &?the Cumberlands, and a year of service she provided at a legal services office in Buffalo, New York, through the Jesuit Volunteer Corp., after graduating from the University of Tennessee College of Law.

At that first job she advocated for elderly people, with the majority of cases involving Medicare/Medicaid.

“I loved the complexity of the law and how much it meant to people to get health care,” she says. “I loved that they felt valued. Giving them what they needed to end their suffering or make their days brighter meant the world. What a great way to bring people back into the community, reminding people that they are valuable — even when we can’t win the case.”

TJC was born at a time when Congress had put new restrictions on what Legal Service Corporation-funded organizations could do, “a hodgepodge of things that were politically controversial,”

Johnson says. Leaders of the bar were considering ways to respond to these restrictions, she says. “Private lawyers set us up. It was such an amazing thing that private lawyers said, ‘We don’t want to have a second-class legal system just because they can’t pay for their lawyers.’”

Others across the country reacted the way Tennessee’s bar leaders did, starting similar non-LSC-funded advocacy organizations in 32 states, she says. She recounts what she calls a “touching moment,” when directors of several legal services organizations asked the Tennessee Bar Foundation to award them less that year so that TJC could be funded initially.

With that kind of support and a lot of faith, TJC, a non-profit public interest law and advocacy firm, was born. Working on such heartrending cases for long hours might take its toll, but Johnson and Bonnyman have a work relationship that obviously has succeeded. “We often view situations in exact opposite ways,” she laughs. “After a full discussion we have a really good product.”

The TJC’s mission was, and remains, to operate without government funds, advocating for low-income Tennesseans in civil matters that federally funded Legal Aid programs cannot handle. Since its founding, TJC’s largest source of financial support has been the Tennessee Bar Foundation’s Interest On Lawyers Trust Accounts (IOLTA) program.

Over the years, TJC’s work has primarily been around “food justice,” Johnson says (explaining that means making sure people have food security), welfare reform and health care. They have focused on TennCare, she says because they want “to have as much bang for our buck, to have an impact on the most people across the state.” She loves talking about these causes, her work, its mission and potential impact.

“I feel like we can change the world if we can share what our work is about,” she says. “Often people just don’t understand it.”

TJC has just over a dozen employees, including four attorneys, paralegals and a fundraiser.

“We’re tiny,” Johnson admits. “There are lots of resources on the other side. It feels like we’re outnumbered sometimes.”

“We hire people who are compassionate,” she says from the conference room of TJC’s offices, wedged in a space on the bottom floor of a downtown Nashville parking garage. “Our culture here is we have to laugh, otherwise we would be too tired to be strong for our clients,” she says. “We have fun.”

One of the group’s compassionate policies, for instance, is that when an employee has a baby, that employee may bring the baby to the office for the child’s first year.

“We’ve had seven babies,” she says, plus another who was just born. She looks as proud as if they were all her own, and in fact three of them were. She and her husband, attorney Jeff Hill, have three boys, ages 14, 12 and 9. When they were small, she would come to work at 4:30 a.m. and leave at 2:30 p.m., but now “it’s more sane” she says about her 8 a.m. to 5:30 or 6 p.m. schedule (she often works a couple more hours after the boys are in bed). “If we don’t have a crisis,” she tries to be home by 6 every night. “It’s super important that they have quantity of time in order to have quality,” she says. Then she’s up and running (literally, with a group from her church) at 5:30 the next morning. “I run a lot,” she says. “I absolutely believe you have to put the oxygen mask on your face before the person you’re caring for. I’m pretty clear you have to take care of yourself.” She realizes the natural inclination is if you just work harder you can get more done, but says she has come to believe that “sometimes you need to work better.”

Low Pay, Tragic Subjects: What’s Not to Love?

All lawyers have careers, but for some it is more than that. After Johnson had been at it for several years, she says she was offered a job to work in the governor’s office. “They said, ‘We could pay you a lot more money.’” The look on her face as she ponders that prospect, recalling it would have doubled her salary, is not at all conflicted and she chuckles. “If I was doing it for the money, I would’ve been gone years ago. There’s no logic to this,” she smiles. “It is a calling.”

There are many good parts, she insists. One of the best is “getting to work with clients who are incredibly courageous and inspiring.”

“There’s a lot at stake,” she says of this job that holds people’s futures in her hands. “It’s heartbreaking because we know what it means for the kids, the parents, the community for them to go without health care.”

“It’s hard to keep answering the call,” she says, “but my faith gives me perspective on the darkness that we see.”

In a “normal” year, Johnson says they serve 300 to 500 clients. By October 2014, however, they had already served nearly 800 and she anticipated hitting 1,000 by year’s end. The larger numbers are because of the increased availability of health care through the Affordable Care Act (ACA). That new availability also brought a lot of issues, questions and problems for people trying to sign up. Tens of thousands of TennCare applications have been delayed many months or lost altogether, Johnson wrote in her year-end letter to supporters.

If we doubled in size we still couldn’t keep up with the demand.”

To stretch its resources as much as possible, the TJC conducted about 100 training sessions on the new eligibility rules so that health care workers and volunteers could help those in need sign up for health insurance.

TJC has also been doing trainings and providing support for volunteer attorneys on how to take these cases to an administrative hearing. “You have a right to a hearing,” she points out. “Your chance of winning goes way up when you have a lawyer. We have been moved by the number of firms who have helped us.”

By the time open enrollment closed in April 2014, 150,000 Tennesseans had obtained commercial coverage through the marketplace and 83,000 more were enrolled in TennCare. “But for the TJC’s training efforts and success in removing state regulatory barriers to [the volunteers’] participation,” Bonnyman writes, “few if any of these volunteers would have been able to provide assistance.”

TJC does have to turn people away, she says. The center closes intake for certain types of cases periodically and reopens it when it can.

She recounts a case where they were fighting to be able to keep a mother with a terminal medical condition at home and not be forced to stay in a facility hours from where her children were, which is what was required by the rules of TennCare at the time.

“The family said, ‘We know she’s going to die, but we want her to die with us,” Johnson says, a tear in her eye. After the TJC fought on the mother's behalf, she was given the services she needed to spend her last days at home with her children. “’What a gift you gave us,’” Johnson says the family told her.

“Michele has been especially creative and passionate in holding up TJC’s clients as worthy of respect,” Bonnyman writes, describing the “Mother of the Year” award Johnson began years ago, which recognizes the heroism and altruism of low-income parents of children with special needs. “She is passionate in her devotion to her clients and to the cause of equal justice.”

In the summer of 2014, two groups — the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Health Law Program — joined with TJC in a federal class action lawsuit against the State of Tennessee for Medicaid practices that deprived thousands of people access to health care coverage despite eligibility.

“When the state refused other remedial steps, we filed the country’s first lawsuit (Melissa Wilson, et al. v. Darin Gordon, et al.) challenging a state’s failure to comply with the ACA.” In September, U.S. District Court Judge Todd Campbell ordered that a fair hearing be provided to all class members who have proof of application and request such a hearing, benefitting a plaintiff class of more than 100,000 vulnerable Tennesseans.

“We couldn’t do it without those who ride to the rescue to partner with us to make sure our health care system is more compassionate. When we feel like we have very little resources and we know we have partners who have our back, it helps us out on the hard days.”

How Do They Pay for It?

TJC relies on a lot of fundraising to pay its bills. One effort is the “Raising the Bar” campaign, which resulted in about $41,000 for the TJC last year. This year, there are already pledges in place for $48,000, enough for a full-time staff person.

And every little bit counts. If  Johnson’s blood runs with compassion, the same could be said for her three boys: for one thing, they set up a lemonade stand every year to raise funds for TJC. Their lemonade money is added to the coffers; making up one more piece of this year’s $275,000 fundraising goal.

In Bonnyman’s nomination of Johnson for the TBA award, he wrote that she “led the TJC through a critical transition … establishing the organization on a sounder financial footing and improving the effectiveness of its service.” Johnson admits that they had their “best financial year yet,” but credits it back to Bonnyman. “We harvested much of the good work he had done at the end of last year. Many gave in honor of his career.”

“It wouldn’t happen but for a million different little miracles and sacrifices and overwhelming love,” Johnson says. Recently after a fundraising request went out, Johnson says three former clients donated within three hours. “They don’t have anything,” she says. “They gave with nothing to give.”

TJC also uses volunteers and interns in creative ways. They get donations of legal work, yes, but also photography, accounting and office work. Last year, 60 volunteers put in 3,500 hours, which includes law, undergrad and high school students. One volunteer comes in on her lunch hour several times a week to coordinate volunteers and information just for the Wilson case.

“They always say ‘Thank you for letting me do that,’” Johnson says. “I’m the luckiest lawyer on the face of the earth.”

— Suzanne Craig Robertson

Law Student Volunteer of the Year

This award recognizes a Tennessee law school student who provides outstanding volunteer services while working with an organization that provides legal representation to the indigent. This year’s honoree is JENNIFER MAYHAM, a recent graduate of the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law.

Jennifer Mayham attended her first law school class when she was 7 — torts — and knew immediately law wasn’t for her. “I thought no one in their right mind would want to do this. The experience of shadowing her school-teacher mother as she earned a law degree at the University of Tennessee College of Law in the 1980s didn’t feel the same when she followed a similar path several decades later. Like her mother, Mayham at 42 found herself as a single mom “needing something else to do” with her life. And — although her first plan was to become a veterinarian — like her mother, she chose law school.

“ I did not believe I would love it as much as I do,” Mayham says. “Law school was not my favorite thing, but I was fortunate because I know what the practice is. When law school was miserable that’s what got me through. I know what it’s like to make a difference.”

She knows this because she has spent many, many hours volunteering and working at the Memphis Area Legal Services (MALS) office, not coincidentally where her mother, Mary Mayham, has worked for more than 25 years. Before that, her mother was with Legal Aid in Louisiana.

“She has always been a legal services lawyer,” the younger Mayham says. “I’ve watched her fight for people who just needed that second chance to get their lives on track. The difference she has made in those lives!

“People have a misconception that lawyers are all about the money,” which Mayham says means those people don’t understand what the legal profession is really about. “Legal services and people who do the access to justice things are shining examples of how lawyers are helping our communities and our society.”

Mayham lives in Ripley, Tenn., about 60 miles North of Memphis, so that’s how she chose to go to the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law, years after she earned her undergraduate degree in psychology. (After spending so much time in the UT law school lounge as a child, she laughs that she “has been to law school twice now.”) Her sons were in elementary and high school at the time and she needed to be close to her mother for help with them.

She started volunteering at MALS while in law school, even though she didn’t have much time, between school and raising a family. She knew she wanted to help out but it had to be really important to warrant her time. “The free time I have is precious to me. I don’t want to take time away from being a good parent or good student for just anything. It needed to be something that mattered.”

Mayham did extensive work on an employment law case MALS lawyers had in Federal District Court, which settled favorably, writes Frank S. Cantrell, who is deputy director and general counsel at MALS. He points out that she took on primary responsibility for managing the case, keeping nearly 20 clients up to date on all developments, keeping the file organized and researching.

“Jennifer has given 100 percent to us for two solid years,” Cantrell wrote in his nomination. “She is willing to take on any project we give her. Her work and organizational skills are extraordinary. The clients love her.”

It was a win-win proposition. Working on another case with staff attorney Craig Barnes opened her eyes to special education law, which she had not even considered before.

“This is one of those areas of law that I didn’t realize I had a true passion for until I started doing it,” she says. “I fell in love with it. I love special education law and the idea of helping parents understand their rights,” she says.

One of her sons has dyslexia so she says she knows how hard it can be sometimes to get needed services. “It’s a very real problem of communication between parents and school systems, and what’s needed. [Parents] don’t know how to express what they need and why it’s important. Teaching them how to do that empowers them and also the children.”

In her volunteer work she was able to advocate for a 12-year-old who had ADHD issues and was about to be expelled from school. Fearing that he would be sent to an alternative school where Mayham felt he would be exposed to bad influences, she worked to find a place that would be a good fit and beneficial to him, which she did.

“To see the joy in his eyes that he was going to get a chance is one of those things I won’t ever forget,” she says. “He comes up and hugs me and lets me know how he is doing.. Those things are small and they don’t make text books. But they changed his life and the people around him — because if he stays out of trouble, his family also benefits — and his future is bright. That’s one less child a victim of being lost in the system.”

She’s a daughter, volunteer and law school graduate, but first, she says, “I’m a mom. That’s what I love, spending time with my family and children. I don’t know what else I would rather do.” Her younger son, Kevin, is on a debate team and her older son, Charles, will graduate from the University of Memphis in May with a degree in management information systems. She says she thinks Kevin has a “knack” for the law. “I hold out hope,” she says of him and a possible career as a lawyer. “I never thought I would end up in the law.”

Right now she is focused on being a mom, studying for the February bar exam and continuing her volunteer work at MALS.

“It’s not always about a paycheck. It sometimes truly is about doing what’s right and helping people who can’t help themselves,” Mayham says. “It reminds me that being an attorney is a noble profession.”

— Suzanne Craig Robertson