Dinner to Honor Sargent Shriver for the National Center on Poverty Law
While Sargent Shirver is most remembered by RPCVs as Founding Director of the Peace Corps, some may not be aware that his vision extended much further. He was President Johnson's head of the War on Poverty and was responsible for Head Start, the Job Corps, and VISTA. Later as a private citizen he and his wife started the Special Olympics. As Harris Wofford said to us during an exclusive interview at the Peace Vigil held at Lincoln Memorial on September 21, 2001, "Sargent Shriver is the greatest social engineer of the 20th century."
One of Sarge's proudest accomplishments was the National Center on Poverty Law - founded as a pivotal component of the federal legal services program. The Center will launch a national fund-raising program on May 1, 2003 to address the deficiencies in comprehensive support services that currently exist in the delivery of legal services to the poor. In honor of Sargent Shriver, the Center will host a dinner in Los Angeles on May 1 chaired by Warren Christopher, Mickey Kantor and Ron Olson, and keynoted by President Bill Clinton. Supported by this national effort, the Center will provide critical services to the poverty law and pro bono community in using the law and policy to end poverty in the United States. Read the letter of invitation and the Press Release at:
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Dinner to Honor Sargent Shriver for the National Center on Poverty Law
We write to request your participation in a gala dinner on Thursday, May 1, 2003, in Los Angeles to celebrate the remarkable achievements of the Honorable R. Sargent Shriver. The event will salute Mr. Shriver for his pathbreaking work in conceiving and establishing a national system of legal services for low-income people.
The Honorable William J. Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States, will keynote the dinner to benefit the work of the National Center on Poverty Law, which Sargent Shriver and President Lyndon B. Johnson founded in 1967.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the Shriver children, Bobby, Maria, Timothy, Mark, and Anthony, will also join us as we extol Sargent Shriver's leadership in shattering the poverty barrier to achieving the rights and opportunities that we all hold dear.
The Shriver Dinner will launch a national support campaign for the Center's work. Though based in Chicago with a strong advocacy presence there, the Center, as Sargent Shriver envisioned it in 1967, is the strategic hub of a national network of lawyers working to help people move out of poverty. What he saw over 30 years ago, and what the Center sees every day, is that the factors keeping people in poverty are only partly economic. Unlawful discrimination (on the basis of race, sex, religion, ethnicity, age, and handicap) insidiously works against people in poverty, as do the unequal enforcement of laws meant to protect everyone and the enactment of laws that violate constitutional mandates of equal protection, due process, privacy, and freedom of expression. The Center enables poverty lawyers who lack the resources of national law firms or the government to advocate on behalf of their clients on a level playing field.
The dinner will represent an extraordinary tribute to Sargent Shriver from today's leaders in politics, law, labor, business, and the media for his lifetime of achievements. We are holding it in Los Angeles to demonstrate the breadth of his appeal and the Center's mandate. The evening will be a wonderful and well-earned celebration of a man whose name is probably better known than his many brilliant achievements. Sargent Shriver is of course responsible for launching and guiding the Peace Corps, HeadStart, the Job Corps, and VISTA-all programs that represent governmental resourcefulness at its best. But Sargent Shriver's most noteworthy and creative achievement is probably his success in bringing Congress and the established bar together to implement a program for ending poverty through a locally based, nationally coordinated legal services program. Indeed, Sargent Shriver's unique and important role in public life for over fifty years has been to translate so many American ideals into practical possibilities.
In Sargent Shriver's own words, "When we started the War on Poverty, . . . one fact stood out clear and hard: to be successful, our efforts would have to affect the basic concerns in the daily life of a poor person. And nothing is more basic to Americans than the right to justice, the right to equality before the law."
The importance of Sargent Shriver's pivotal role in establishing legal services as key to ending poverty in the United States-and the importance of boosting such services to serve the enormous continuing need for them-cannot be overestimated. Indeed, how can we attain liberty and the pursuit of happiness-our inalienable rights-if we cannot be certain that the justice system governing our lives is equally accessible to all?
President Clinton's keynote address at the May 1st dinner will launch a multiyear commitment of the National Center on Poverty Law to raise $10 million to underwrite its programs to advance Sargent Shriver's vision. Leaders from Los Angeles as well as from all over the country will all be present to celebrate Sargent Shriver and to support his vision.
Please join us in honoring Sargent Shriver and the fine work of the National Center on Poverty Law. We encourage you to participate at the highest level possible as many thousands will benefit from your generosity. Should you have any questions, please contact our Event Coordinators, Levy, Pazanti & Associates at (310) 201-5033.
We look forward to your participation. More about the National Center on Poverty Law
Read more about the National Center on Poverty Law at:
"…When we started the War Against Poverty… one fact stood out clear and hard: to be successful, our efforts would have to affect the basic concerns in the daily life of a poor person. And nothing is more basic to Americans than the right to justice, the right to equality before the law."
"THE LAW CAN HELP GET THE POOR OUT OF POVERTY." R. Sargent Shriver, Director, War on Poverty, 1966
OVERVIEW
The National Center on Poverty Law-founded by R. Sargent Shriver during the War on Poverty as a pivotal component of the federal legal services program-is in the early stages of inviting various corporations, law firms and individuals to lead a new effort in support of Sarge's vision.
The twofold goal of the effort is to:
" enlarge the Center's technological infrastructure and legal training and education programs-developed in association with other legal services' "support centers"-in order to fully support representation of poor people by lawyers--both pro bono and public service-- wherever they may be located; and
" develop these lawyers and other equal justice advocates into a powerful and ever-present national force for public policies that eradicate poverty.
When Sarge directed the War on Poverty in the 1960s, he spearheaded one of the greatest and most necessary advancements in the American justice system-implementing President Lyndon B. Johnson's national commitment to ending poverty by making sure that every person, no matter how poor and no matter where he or she lived, would have effective legal representation when needed.
Lawyers staffing the neighborhood offices-created by the federal government through the War on Poverty and the Legal Services Corporation-not only represented clients struggling with the constant and complex legal problems that poverty induces, but also heard directly from their clients about what was needed in order to, in Sarge's words, "help get the poor out of poverty."
These local lawyers were also part of a national institutional network of anti-poverty advocates, including the National Center on Poverty Law (formerly known as the National Clearinghouse for Legal Services), whose work buttressed strategies for ending poverty advanced by leaders of the states and cities, bar, business and Congress.
However, their common purpose, to end poverty in America, has not yet been achieved-hence the need to secure the Center's work into the future and to use twenty-first-century means to do so.
PROGRAM
The Center will launch a national fund-raising program on May 1, 2003 to address the deficiencies in comprehensive support services that currently exist in the delivery of legal services to the poor. In honor of Sargent Shriver, the Center will host a dinner chaired by Warren Christopher, Mickey Kantor and Ron Olson, and keynoted by President Bill Clinton. Supported by this national effort, the Center will provide critical services to the poverty law and pro bono community in using the law and policy to end poverty in the United States.
Consequently, the Center will be the focal point for all the lawyers who share Sarge's dream of ending poverty.
At the dinner, Sarge will be joined by his wife, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, and their children Timothy, Maria, Mark, Bobby and Anthony.
The Center's national fund-raising program will enable it to:
" expand its state-of-the-art Internet-based system, www.povertylaw.org-a system that would cost millions of dollars for someone else to replicate-to provide the Web-based mechanisms for obtaining case documents, memoranda, law review articles, and other work products to thousands of lawyers simultaneously;
" keep lawyers abreast of developments in poverty law and policy through electronic and print dissemination of the Clearinghouse Review: Journal of Poverty Law and Policy;
" conduct training sessions and strategic planning sessions to facilitate the joint development of strategies that ameliorate conditions, laws, or policies that engender poverty;
" foster and staff advocacy collaborations among lawyers and nationally based policy and legal advocates to advance their common antipoverty agenda; and
" educate the media and the general public about the needs of poor people and the ways to eliminate poverty in America.
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