Douglas Lasdon founded the Urban Justice Center as a one-person operation in a burned-out building in East Harlem, to provide badly needed legal services to one of New York City's most underserved populations - single, homeless adults. To make his services accessible to his clients, he conducted outreach legal clinics directly in soup kitchens, making us the first organization in the country to use this approach.
Since then, Lasdon has greatly expanded the agency's size, scope, and influence, while still holding fast to its core mission - helping those at the farthest margins of society, both one at a time and collectively. In addition to leading the agency, he continues to represent individual clients and to engage in impact litigation.
Prior to founding the Urban Justice Center, Lasdon was a Fellow and Staff Attorney at Covenant House in New York City. He has been an adjunct faculty member at New York University since 1985, and has also served as a consultant to the World Bank, and as a Wasserstein Fellow at Harvard Law School.
Douglas Lasdon graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and received his law degree from Cornell University Law School.
I think mostly, what would surprise them is the homeless themselves. There's a wide variety of homeless. They are lovely, lovely people. I'm thinking of one client in particular who has - had a 25-year work history and his hand crushed in the printing press and lost his job, and then printing, th...(Full transcript available to logged in subscribers.).
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