Day of service
By all objective measures, this past Saturday should have been miserable. I spent the afternoon, trudging through random neighborhoods on four hours of sleep, in the middle of a downpour. Given all of these factors, it would probably be a little strange to know that I was actually really enjoying myself.
This past weekend was Fall Fest, a Harvard-wide day of service. Basically, the school organized a bunch of service projects and encouraged students to participate in them. I’m not going to pretend that my initial inkling towards getting involved was completely altruistic. The night of the deadline to sign-up, I got an excited email from a friend of mine saying that our section was four people away from being the section with the most people to participate. The prize for the most well-represented section was a free tab at the bar of their choosing. I figured that if I got to help the community, hang out with my friends, and get a shot at free drinks all at the same event, it probably made sense to give it a try.
I threw my name down on the last activity that still had spots available, Project No One Leaves. I woke up the next morning, bright and early, and headed over to campus to figure out what I would be doing that day. As it turns out, No One Leaves is a group that educates foreclosed homeowners and renters about their options and provides them with free legal advice. I was going to spend the day with a small group of law students, going door to door to homes that had recently been foreclosed on and talking with the residents about their rights. After a training session, we were broken up into small groups and assigned a member of No One Leaves to canvass with.
On the drive over to the neighborhood that we would be canvassing, I started to ask our group leader more about the rights of foreclosed people. She told me a number of things that I had not known about the foreclosure crisis. For one, the banks usually try to undergo “no fault” evictions. They will try to kick renters off the foreclosed property despite the fact that the renters have paid, and would like to continue to pay, their rent. If this doesn’t work they will offer people small, one-time cash sums to get people out of their homes. What is most incredible is that in most instances the tenant has the right to stay in their home, if the eviction is of no fault of their own. The whole situation was something I had read about in the paper and seen on the news, but not something I had been given a chance to interact with firsthand.
As we began canvassing I was surprised by a number of things. At first, I was shocked at how welcoming people were to us. I am not sure why, but I had just assumed that people would be highly suspicious of the random ivy league twenty-somethings that had showed up on their doorstep on a Saturday morning, with fliers in hand ready to lecture them about the law. In actuality, people were just excited to have some reasonable person speak with them about their situations.
The other thing that surprised me, was how I was able to apply what I had been learning in class to what I was seeing that day. In civil procedure, we had learned that before taking away someone’s property you must give them “service of process” or fair notice. But if this were true, why were so many of the people we were speaking with learning of their foreclosure for the first time? In contracts, we learned that in order for a contract to be formed there must be a “meeting of the minds”. But how could the tenants and the banks be on the same page when the tenants were so woefully misinformed about their rights?
I know that the rudimentary grasp of these complex issues I have as a first semester law student probably didn’t allow me to fully understand what I was seeing. However, it wouldn’t take a legal expert to realize that on some level the situations we were confronting were fundamentally unjust. When we were driving back home after our day spent canvassing, I was pretty glad that my friends had managed to convince me to come out. I had spent the day learning about a truly meaningful application of my coursework, placed in a setting that, up until that point, I had only really known from newspaper headlines and talking head segments. I’m not sure if this is a fair barometer of how successful the day was, but I had actually forgotten about the free bar tab that had driven me to help out in the first place, until I wrote about it for this post.
- Anit
