Legal Services of Greater Miami
Miami, FL
Jackie Ebert is thrilled to have to opportunity to spend her fellowship term at Legal Services of Greater Miami where she will be working with the staff and guests at Lotus Village, a trauma-informed homeless shelter serving over 500 women and children each night in Miami-Dade County, to address guests’ legal barriers to housing stability, sustainability, and self-determination. Jackie will work closely with shelter staff and guests to identify the most pressing legal issues preventing guests from being able to successfully transition out of shelter. Jackie’s personal docket will encompass direct representation in a variety of anticipated areas, including public benefits, health care coverage denials, consumer issues, replacement of lost identity documents, permanent residency and naturalization cases, establishing special needs trusts, domestic violence restraining orders, child support modifications, and special education issues.
After her first year of law school at Washington University in St. Louis, Jackie spent a summer as an intern at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, where she worked in its Housing practice. Jackie became so engrossed in the work of the Bureau and its community partner, housing justice group City Life/Vida Urbana, that she transferred to Harvard Law School for her second and third years and joined the Bureau full-time. During her time at the Bureau, her casework chiefly involved representing tenants in fault evictions. She also served for a year on the HLAB Board as its Outreach Director and as one of the co-leaders of the Bureau’s Community Lawyering Task Force, in which capacities she focused on better serving and sustaining the Bureau’s community partnerships, including its longstanding alliance with City Life/Vida Urbana.
Jackie holds a Masters in Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis—with an individualized specialization focusing on homelessness—as well as a Bachelors in Social Work from University of Madison, Wisconsin. Between college and law school, she worked as the Program Director at a camp in upstate New York for children in the foster care and shelter system in New York City and served as the Volunteer Coordinator at an emergency seasonal homeless shelter in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Jackie is thrilled to make her longtime dream of working as a lawyer in a shelter a reality, and is grateful for the opportunity to continue David Grossman’s legacy through her work.