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HOME	GET INVOLVED	MEMBERS & LIAISONS	CONTACT

HOW TO GET INVOLVED

Over the past 2 years, over 3000 law students from across the country have traveled to the Gulf Coast to provide quality legal services to residents in crisis. The work to be done in the Gulf Coast, and consequently our commitment to such work, has only increased. The Gulf Coast is at a critical juncture, and we are in need of your support and leadership to continue to meet the needs of a rebuilding community.

Currently we have a great team of leaders who are pushing SHN into the next phase, click here to see who’s involved with SHN leadership.

Email List
If you are interested in learning more about how SHN runs, we would like to invite you to join the Leadership Committee Email List. The National Advisory Board often requests feedback from the engaged leaders on the Leadership Committee Email List, and it is a great way to find out about the interesting projects being developed by SHN. To sign up to be on the list, go to and enter in your info here. From this page you can you can also sign up for the Liaisons or Newsletter email lists.

Weekly Conference Calls
Each week, we convene a conference call to talk about ongoing SHN projects (Matchmakers for Justice, Student Trips, Report Back Events, etc.) and to brainstorm other ways SHN can affect change in the Gulf Coast. The calls are open to anyone who wants to join and is a great way to learn about ways to get involved – just sign up for the Leadership Committee Email List to receive the call-in information.

If you have any questions, need any clarification or just want to chat about your interest, please don’t hesitate to contact us at studenthurricanenetwork@gmail.com.

Open Positions:
Law School/Institutional Liaisons
Legal Services Providers Liaison
Partner/Professional Organization Liaisons
National Trips and Institutional Liaisons Coordinator
Regional Trips and IL Coordinator
Emergency Contact
Orientation leaders
Newsletter Editor
SHN Diversity Chair/Committee
SHN Web Support Team
Matchmakers for Justice
SHN Alumni

Liaisons: we work very hard to maintain a consistent and substantive relationship with our partner organizations (legal services providers and community organizing groups in the Gulf Coast) and students interested in social justice in the Gulf Coast (including law schools, student groups and professional organizations.

Law School/Institutional Liaisons
Institutional liaisons are crucial to SHN’s success. These students coordinate their school’s “delegation” to the Student Hurricane Network. These students represent SHN on their campuses, particularly for recruitment and fundraising purposes. Institutional liaisons hold informational meetings on campus to introduce the organization and encourage student participation. At this time, most of the fundraising to defray students’ travel costs to the affected region is campus-based. Therefore, liaisons work with their school’s administration and student bar association to determine available funding. Institutional liaisons are also important as they represent their campuses to SHN leaders. Students from different law schools can have very different needs and experiences, and SHN leadership relies on institutional liaisons to inform and respond to these issues as they arise.

• Responsibilities
• Coordinate their school’s “delegation” to the Student Hurricane Network.
• Represent the Student Hurricane Network on their campuses, particularly for recruitment and fundraising purposes.
• Work with their school’s administration and student bar association to determine available funding.
• Hold informational meetings on campus to introduce the organization and encourage student participation.
• Communicate with their school’s membership opportunities for involvement in national SHN activities.

Legal Services Providers Liaison
Our local (Gulf Coast) legal services contacts are our partners in the fight for justice in the region. They are our mentors, our supervisors, our friends, and our biggest cheerleaders. The LSO Liaison, along with the help of the SHN National Advisory Board, would be responsible for maintaining our close working relationships with these legal rock stars.

• Responsibilities
• Maintain database of contacts at legal services and volunteer organizations in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas
• Keeps contacts current for trips and for linking orgs with pro bono help from private firms around the country (in partnership with Pro Bono Liaison)

Partner/Professional Organization Liaisons
SHN is constantly developing new relationships with other organizations.  These relationships allow us to participate in workshops, receive aid (both financial and otherwise) from various organizations, to provide aid to other great causes, and to work closely with many advocates for the Gulf Coast region as well as broader social justice issues.

• Responsibilities
• cultivate our relationships with these organizations
• meeting on conference calls with these organizations
• assisting in workshop applications
• participating in any bodies in which the partner organization feels appropriate
• regularly reporting developments to the National Advisory Board
• Liaison positions would include (but are not limited to):
• Society of American Law Teachers (SALT)
• American Bar Association Law Student Division (ABA LSD)
• National Black Law Students Association (NBLSA)
• National Lawyers’ Guild (NLG)

National Trips and Institutional Liaisons Coordinator
The National Trips and IL Coordinator would be responsible for managing, coordinating and organizing with the Regional Trips and IL Coordinators.

• Responsibilities:
• Organize network of regional Trips and IL Coordinators,
• Distribute trips information and compile trip info (travel, emergency contact, etc.) from Regional Coordinators
• Coordinate SHN placements with Legal Services Orgs Liaison over winter, spring and summer trips
• Assist with outreach to legal services orgs in the region
• Summer Law School Liaisons Outreach: Recruit a team to reach out to reconstitute the institutional liaisons for the 2007/2008 school year.
• Assess what institutional liaisons we have identified for next year
• Follow up with outgoing liaisons to identify new leadership
• Reach out to schools where we do not have liaisons (through PILF, career counselors, ABA reps, etc)
• This is a big and important task, for which a small group of folks could be a big support. This is also the kind of work that serves as an investment in heightened assistance in the long-term. This might also involve a process of rethinking the role of IL in the future.

Regional Trips and IL Coordinator
Regional Institutional Liaisons are the lifeblood of SHN – with out ILs we would have no mechanism to communicate on a local level with the thousands of law students who are interested in SHN activities and volunteer trips.

• Responsibilities
• Creates and maintains regional networks, planning events and recruiting new ILs from area law schools
• Distributes trips information and compiles trip info from their region to send to National Trip Coordinator/NAB member
• Assist with Summer Law School Liaisons Outreach (see National Trips and IL Coordinator description)
• Regional chairs needed for:
• New York, DC, Boston, Chicago, Upper Midwest, Midwest, Mideast, Southeast/Gulf States, Texas, California.
• Summer Regional Meetings: Folks are working in amazing public interest jobs across the country this summer.  Especially in New Orleans, but also elsewhere, it would be cool to pull folks together in different cities across the country.  We would want to be clear about what we hope to achieve in these regional meeting and that the meeting facilitators are fully aware of current activities, etc, but we could convene a series of regional meetings in DC, NY, Philly, LA, Chicago, and any other cities where there are folks that are interested in getting together to talk about the ongoing issues in the region and what law students can do to get involved.

Emergency Contact — An on the ground person in Louisiana, Mississippi, or other areas where we have volunteers to contact in the event of any emergencies affecting the health, safety, or transportation of individuals volunteering in the region.  This individual is charged with compiling the relevant information that might be needed in cases of emergencies including but not limited to:  area hospitals & clinics, contacts for local law enforcement agencies, towing companies, public transportation etc. This person would also be responsible for contacting those listed as emergency contacts in the files of our volunteers, including family members, trip coordinators, and school officials.

Orientation Leaders — Should be someone from or attending school in the Gulf Coast Region, or at someone who is familiar with the culture of the region through past volunteer or work experiences.  This person does not necessarily need to be a law student.  Such and individual will be charged with arranging/coordinating:

• Presenters to speak at the Sunday evening orientations
• Providing transportation information that will enable volunteers to coordinate carpooling efforts or best utilize the local public transportation
• Provide information on local food/service providers in an effort to encourage the patronage of homegrown local businesses

Newsletter Editor
The newsletter is our primary way of keeping membership updated on SHN activities as well as keeping membership informed and educated about the ongoing issues in the region.

• Responsibilities
• Helping/taking over newsletter
• Proactively work to make sure SHN projects are communicated to the membership and our partners through the newsletter
• Perhaps make a paper one after each trip season to send to relevant orgs and media.

SHN Diversity Chair/Committee
The realities of this work make us keenly aware of the benefit and the need of having a racially and ethnically diverse group of student working together for a common goal. We’ve already taken steps toward achieving this goal by reaching out to NBLSA to create programs, trips and opportunities for leadership.

• The Committee would be tasked with enhancing racial/ethnic diversity among SHN participants and leadership through
• Assessment of current diversity,
• Conducting an analysis of why diversity is important within SHN, and
• Developing a plan to carrying out some form of diversification.  
• Once these tasks are in motion, the committee would raise awareness about diversity within out activities and to affirmatively heighten more diverse involvement among SHN participants/leadership.

SHN Web Support Team
SHN’s website can be one its most visible and easily accessible recruitment and fund-raising tools. It can serve as our office and promote institutional memory and operational transparency. We need an attractive website that offers both easy to understand material about SHN and also acts as rich resource for the day-to-day and long range operation of SHN. The website should balance long-term scalability with the ability for non-technical users to update its content.
This latter role will require maintaining a relationship with a web designer to tweak the website as necessary. Because the web support role will be held by different people as the leadership in SHN turns over, it would be best for the web designer to be from a web design firm, and not a less formal relationship based mostly on personal connections.

• Responsibilities of the team
• Lead and coordinate the design of the new website, working closely with the National Advisory Board
• Serve as the contact person for updates, maintenance and problems once the website is rolled out

Matchmakers for Justice
SHN's Matchmakers for Justice (M4J) program is in the process of establishing a database of schools with students who would like to take on remote legal service projects. When legal aid organizations in the Gulf contact us with specific projects, we would like to utilize our database to send the projects out to students who are willing to handle them. It is our experience that the legal aid organizations would prefer to send out projects to students who have a faculty member or local attorney serving as a supervisor that can answer questions and help guide the project through its completion. These student-faculty teams provide the most efficient assistance to our partner organizations.

In the past, students have handled projects covering administrative law issues (i.e. FEMA appeals), successions, bankruptcy and uncontested divorce. If you are interested in any of these project areas or you have another area of interest, please let us know. For more information, email Matchmakers4justice@gmail.com.

SHN Alumni
SHN Alumni is an outgrowth of the Student Hurricane Network. It is comprised of recent graduates with a continued desire to assist SHN with its mission. SHN Alumni will act in an advisory capacity to SHN. As professionals in the public and private sector SHN Alumni will seek to leverage these new positions for the benefit of SHN. SHN Alumni will serve as a valuable tool for preserving institutional memory, initiating outreach to other alumni of SHN and other professionals, fundraising, and participating in projects that further SHN's mission.

SHN Alumni is just getting off the ground, so if you are interested in receiving email from SHN Alumni or if you know other SHN volunteers who have graduated, please let us know! To get in contact with SHN Alumni or to be added to our email list please email Alene Grossman and Abraham Salcedo at: shnalumni@gmail.com.