A helping hand for helping hands
INLAND VALLEY March 9, 2002
Mancy Mintie's Uncommon Good organization pays the school
debts of attorneys and health-care workers dedicated to serving
those less fortunate.
By Joanna Corman / [email protected]
Linda Samels Ceballos entered Loyola Law School in Los Angeles
knowing she wanted to represent the poor. She graduated in 1995
owing $58,000 in loans.
She was about to run out of means to pay back those loans when
she took a job at the Inner City Law Center in Los Angeles, a firm
that fights slum landlords. It was there that she met Nancy
Mintie.
Mintie, a Claremont resident, made it possible for Ceballos to
represent poor clients against wealthy landlords, a calling about
as low-paying as lawyer jobs get, and pay off her loans at the same
time. "It kind of stepped in at the right time," said Ceballos, who
has loan payments averaging $800 a month and whose starting salary
was $30,000. "Because of the program, I've been able to stay here.
... There was no way I could make that payment. I barely make it
now with my regular bills."
Mintie, who turns 48 this month, started Uncommon Good in
December 1999. The nonprofit operation pays the debts of attorneys
and health care professionals who work with the poor. It grew out
of her work at the Inner City Law Center, which she founded in
1980, and often depended on the skills of young lawyers with a
social conscience. In 1998, she stepped down from her role as
director. Over the next year she realized she needed incentives to
keep lawyers around after they got a few years of experience. Not
only were there fewer attorneys entering the field of poverty law,
some were being driven out of the profession.
The reason: With attorneys one year out of graduate school
facing an average debt of just less than $90,000 and starting
salaries at legal aid organizations averaging $31,000, they
couldn't afford the job.
"It really had become an economic impossibility to take these
jobs and survive on them," Mintie said. "That finding became the
wake-up call for me and hopefully it will be the wake-up call for
others in a community that cares about access to justice for the
poor."
Her career started more than 20 years ago in a garage behind a
Catholic Worker soup kitchen on skid row in Los Angeles. She lived
on a $3-a-week stipend that she spent on pantyhose and bus
fare.
Her law practice grew to an organization that brought in
millions of dollars of damages through its cases against L.A.
slumlords, allowing poor families to set up college funds and buy
homes. In all those years, she never lost a case.
When she stepped down, she had time to notice what was happening
to the field of poverty law.
"I realized with a shock that the work had really disintegrated
and we had lost a whole generation of public-interest lawyers," she
said. "It had gone from being an economic sacrifice as it was in my
day to an economic impossibility. ... The whole system has
essentially collapsed."
Mintie also started to ask questions about the medical field.
Almost every person who walks into a free medical clinic, she said,
faces some legal problem such as an eviction or the loss of Social
Security benefits. And many of her clients had medical problems
from living in slum housing such as cockroaches lodged in ear
canals and rat bite fever, a nonfatal malady that particularly
affects children. Mintie noticed that health-care professionals
were graduating with staggering debts and also couldn't afford to
work with the poor.
Her work was noticed by Oprah Winfrey, who invited her on the TV
show March 26, 2001. Mintie received a $100,000 "Use Your Life
Award" from Oprah's Angel Network, a nonprofit organization that
awards money to those who help others. Mintie said that all of the
money has gone to her recipients -- none was spent on overhead. She
will be out of funds by spring.
She is trying to get religious organizations to sponsor
recipients. It is a secular organization, but one that grew out of
Mintie's religious convictions.
"I was raised Catholic. I think the tradition for compassion for
the poor encouraged that gift in me," she said. "My faith said,
'Yes, this is right.' "
She said she hopes that religious organizations see the link
between their beliefs and her work.
"For so long there has been such misunderstanding between the
religious community and the work lawyers do for the poor. The work
that we do is the purest form of expression of the core values of
all of the major faith traditions."
Uncommon Good has a few religious sponsors, including her
church, Our Lady of the Assumption in Claremont, where Mintie plays
piano daily at the 6:30 a.m. Mass.
Fourteen people now receive money from Uncommon Good. Debt
payments can be as low as $300 a month and as high as $2,000. Some
recipients grew up poor and want to give back, while others feel
the need despite having a middle-class upbringing. But a
commonality among some of them was a decision all faced -- should
they leave their jobs for higher-paying ones? Their low salaries
and high debt payments were making it impossible to live.
Recipients include Lisa Levsen, 33, a doctor who graduated from
USC Medical School with $144,000 in debt and monthly loan payments
of $1,200. She works as the head physician at the Los Angeles
Mission, a free clinic on skid row.
And William Martinez, 28, who cut his medical school studies
short because he couldn't afford the $39,000 in loans after two
years of graduate school and four years of college. Martinez works
two jobs as a physician's assistant and supports his elderly
parents and 8-year-old son.
Uncommon Good has a 22-member board of doctors, lawyers and
representatives of Christian groups and is recruiting mentors. One
goal is to get the state Legislature to pass a law to provide loan
forgiveness to medical professionals and lawyers who work with the
poor. Mintie said she hopes her organization can be a national
model for other professions.
She is trying to bring legal aid services to the Inland Valley
-- the closest legal aid office is in El Monte and represents
700,000 poor people throughout the San Fernando, San Gabriel and
Inland valleys.
"Unless the legal aid is in the community, you can't say you are
serving the poor," Mintie said.
Neal Dudovitz is the executive director of Neighborhood Legal
Services of Los Angeles County, the legal aid office in El Monte.
He sees attorneys new to poverty law leave all the time because
they can't afford the salary with their law school debt.
"She's really opened a lot of eyes in terms of having people
understand how the educational debt is limiting and reducing the
services that are available to low-income communities," Dudovitz
said. "Nancy is light years ahead of the curve on this stuff. Very
little is being done practically to solve it."
Mintie, her colleagues say, could have made a lot of money in
private practice.
"She's very kind and pleasant," said Julius Thompson, 45, an
attorney at Inner City Law Center and an Uncommon Good recipient.
"But she's also a woman on a mission. When she sets her sights on
something, she's a formidable force."
