Law students, faculty offer MLK Day service to Family Futures

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LEGAL NEWS PHOTOS BY CYNTHIA PRICE EXCEPT BOTTOM ONE COURTESY OF COOLEY LAW SCHOOL

Photo 1: Bryana Hopkins, the Volunteer and Project Coordinator at Family Futures, gives students an orientation to the organization and the documents they will be reviewing. At right, Deans Tracey Brame and Nelson Miller; Miller gave a more in-depth introduction to the document review.

Photo 2: Students Amber Jenkins and Sarah Miller took some of the documents into another room and worked as a team.

Photo 3: The group, now with the addition of faculty member experts, came back together for a debriefing.

by Cynthia Price
Legal News

Thomas M.Cooley Law School’s Grand Rapids campus has honored Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., every year since its inception, but this year for the first time the celebration took the form of community service — as only attorneys can do community service.

Previous MLK Day activities have been event-based and held at the Cooley Grand Rapids campus, although they have included a service component at times.

This year, about eight students, one recent graduate now in practice, Deans Nelson Miller and Tracey Brame, and some Cooley faculty members assisted with document review for the non-profit Family Futures.

Brame explained that, when she discussed the idea of doing on-site service with CJ Kruska, the Grand Rapids campus director, Brame realized that Family Futures might be an ideal location. Not only is it a large non-profit with documents and policies that span a number of years, making them ripe for review, but also Brame’s sister-in-law, Trinity Clemens, is the Program Operations Manager there.

Many may know Family Futures better by its most recent previous name, which was Kent County Child and Family Resource Council. But the organization goes back to 1985, and was originally called Kent County Council for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect. At the time, the council was a small non-profit, and over the next ten years was not able to expand very much, despite a mission that resonates across many sectors.

It was not until 1995 (when the Child and Family Resource Council name was adopted) that the organization began to grow. Focusing on early prevention, the organization undertook its Healthy Start program, which offers support  and guidance to parents when their children are very young to give them a leg up once they start school, The Steelcase Foundation and others funded the Healthy Start program. From that point on, growth was continual, today resulting in a robust organization with 12 staff members and several impactful programs.

Family Futures also runs Connections, which offers parents developmental tracking and other information when their children are aged 0-5; a Family Resource Guide, which started publication in 1995 and is available in both Spanish and English; RAVE (Resources Against Violent Encounters) to help teenagers make good relationship choices; and various community education for those working in the field of child abuse and neglect prevention.

The latter includes training for “mandated reporters,” those professionals who are required by law to report child abuse, on how to report as well as what to look for in order to recognize child abuse and neglect.

The small Cooley group volunteering to review Family Futures documents gathered at noon last Monday in a conference room at Family Futures on Front Street.

After Volunteer and Project Coordinator Bryana Hopkins spoke about the organization and gave a brief overview of the type of documents students would look over, Dean Miller asked everyone present to introduce themselves. Students willing to spend their time volunteering came from a variety of walks of life, including some who had volunteered for similar organizations in the past, and one whose daughter had benefited from the services of Family Futures itself.

Brame commented that she felt the day of service “embodies what Dr. King is about.” Miller added that he was in first grade when Martin Luther King was assassinated, and that event along with finding out about King himself was “formative, and had something to do with me becoming a lawyer.”

Miller then laid the ground rules: each team of students would do their best to come up with recommendations for the documents under consideration, which included contracts, the employee manual, memoranda of understanding, and questionnaires, and then a faculty member would review the recommendations before presentation of their ideas in a debriefing at 3:00 p.m. In one instance, Miller led a small team of students going over a large document.

Naturally, the activity represented an opportunity for students to learn more about contracts, employment and equal opportunity law, intellectual property in forms preparation, and other legal issues. The students took notes on what they perceived as flaws, errors, or omissions, but the faculty member/dean review gave them assisted them in learning such law.

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