Legal Aid, Poverty Law, and Why Every Public Interest Attorney Needs to Know About Public Benefits

Did you know low-income Americans did not receive any or enough legal help for 92% of their civil legal problems, driving them deeper into poverty? Join Wasserstein Fellow Lena Silver (’13) to learn about the opportunities for diverse forms of advocacy in poverty law including direct client services, community outreach and organizing, and systemic work through coalition building, legislative and administrative advocacy, and impact litigation. As an expert in public benefits law, with an emphasis in immigrant access to public benefits, Lena will also make the case for why every public interest attorney should be knowledgeable about the safety net, and how pursuing legal work in public benefits is both exciting and critical to fighting poverty.

Lunch provided. Please RSVP below! Open to the HLS community.

If you or an event participant requires disability-related accommodations, please contact HLS Accessibility Services at accessibility@law.harvard.edu two weeks in advance of the event.

Lena Silver is dedicated to combating poverty by elevating the voices of diverse, low-income communities through both direct services and systemic advocacy shaped by the lived experiences of her clients. Lena is currently the Director of Policy and Administrative Advocacy at Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County (NLSLA), where she has worked since 2015. In this role, Lena oversees NLSLA’s public benefits and workers’ rights teams and supports policy and administrative advocacy initiatives across the organization. She began her tenure practicing housing law before shifting her focus to improving access to local, state, and federal public benefits. In 2021, Lena filed Hunger Action Los Angeles, et al. v. County of Los Angeles, et al., on behalf of a harmed client and several community organizations, to enforce the right of food stamp applicants to receive timely emergency assistance. Following the lawsuit, the County improved its processing rate for emergency applications from 50% to 98%. That same year, Lena launched the Benefits Access for Immigrants (BAILA) Los Angeles Network (www.bailanetwork.org), a collaboration among benefits enrollers, outreach workers, and legal aid providers. The network aims to increase immigrant access to public benefits by addressing barriers such as public charge fears and misinformation. Before joining NLSLA, Lena completed a fellowship at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law in Chicago and clerked for a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. She earned her B.A. from UC Berkeley in 2008 and her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2013, where she was a proud member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.