Atlanta Business Chronicle - June 16, 2006
by Leslie Williams Johnson
Contributing Writer

The Georgia Appleseed Center for Law and Justice has been busy since its planting in November.
The nonprofit organization, one of the newest in the group of Appleseed public interest law centers around the nation, raised its concern about the now-dropped House bill that would have attached a 5 percent fee to wire transfers purchased by undocumented immigrants.
That is just one of the issues Georgia Appleseed has broached in its brief existence.
"There's been a pent-up energy for this kind of work," said Sharon Nelson Hill, Georgia Appleseed's executive director and former Fulton County Juvenile Court judge. Hill said Georgia Appleseed is the 17th such center to open in the nation.
Georgia Appleseed's mission is "to listen to the unheard voice of the poor, the children, the marginalized; to uncover and end the injustices that we would not endure ourselves; to win the battles for our constituency in the courts of public opinion or in the halls of justice that no one else is willing or able to fight."
That just boils down to responsibly serving the community, said former Gov. Roy Barnes of The Barnes Law Group LLC and a Georgia Appleseed board member.
"We have an obligation to give back," Barnes said. "We're all blessed because we've been able to function and practice in a free and open society."
Barnes said a state Appleseed center is long overdue.
"I've known about Appleseed nationally for a long time. I kept wondering why we didn't have something in Georgia," he said.
Ted Hester, partner with King & Spalding LLP in Washington, D.C., who serves on the national Appleseed board, said the idea of starting a Georgia center was discussed a few years ago.
The fit was a good one because "Georgia has such a strong network committed to pro bono activity," said Hester, who lived in Georgia until 1983 and was once the president of the Young Lawyers section of the state bar association.
Georgia Appleseed is taking part in three national projects:
1. The No Child Left Behind parent involvement project. The main pro bono partner on the law firm level is Holland & Knight LLP. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP is conducting interviews with school information experts and looking at ways to make data reporting better. The Teachers College of Columbia University also is helping the seven states involved in the project, six of which have Appleseed centers. Under the act, schools are required to collect and disseminate student information -- states involved in the project are looking at how the data is collected, broken down and delivered to parents. A report based on the states' findings is scheduled for release in September. Holland & Knight is drafting the report.
2. Financial access for Latino immigrants. Kilpatrick Stockton is the pro bono partner.
"There's a community issue and there's a good old-fashioned American dream issue," Hill said. "Until people start using the American banking system, it's hard to grow assets and it's hard to get ahead."
There's also safety and security to be considered.
Often, immigrants don't open checking or savings accounts, instead opting to keep their money physically close by. But that tactic can prove fatal: Last fall in Tifton, six Mexican immigrants were murdered in their home while they were asleep. It was reported that the home invasion was sparked by the knowledge that significant amounts of money were kept in the home, Hill said.
To help close the gap and get more Latino immigrants into the banking system, Georgia Appleseed has brochures in Spanish and English that cover topics including opening a bank account; identification needed to open a bank account; how to take out a car loan; how to get a home mortgage; how to send money to another country; and how to avoid bad loans, for example.
Georgia Appleseed has also joined forces with The University of Georgia, whose College of Family and Consumer Sciences/Cooperative Extension is buying 44,000 brochures. The college will distribute the brochures along with UGA's County Extension Service and CLASE, the Center for Latino Achievement and Success in Education.
3. Justice for people with mental illnesses project. King & Spalding is the main pro bono partner.
The first phase of the project is to complete a manual that will guide lawyers who are representing mentally ill clients in the criminal justice system.
"The idea is not [only] to help the lawyer navigate the criminal justice system on behalf of the mentally ill client, but also to get his client out of the criminal justice system and into the mental health system," Hill said.
"If someone is out there breaking the law, and that person's behavior is more a function of their mental illness, it really behooves us as a community to treat the underlying problem," Hill said.
Georgia Appleseed board members come from a cross-section of business, not just law firm attorneys or general counsels of major companies. They include James Blanchard, chairman of Synovus Financial Corp. in Columbus; Cathy Manning of Pricewaterhouse-Coopers; and Portia Shields, president emeritus of Albany State University.
Steve Clay, chairman of Georgia Appleseed, said he hopes by summer's end to add four to six new members to the board. As for keeping Georgia Appleseed, like the others, nonpolitical, Clay said one of the keys is in the make-up of the membership.
"What we tried to do is have a broadly represented board," Clay said.
Hester, of the national board, agreed. "I think in the creation of the Appleseed boards in Atlanta and elsewhere, my experience and observation has been the founders and the board members are committed to getting good diversity on their boards. There's clearly an effort to get all points of view represented on the board."
But, he added, staying true to the mission overcomes the issue of politics.
"There's a problem in the community [to identify and solve] that has nothing to do with partisanship. Politics have not really been relevant," Hester said.
Barnes said it is "invigorating to be around the various representatives on the Georgia Appleseed board and to hear their views.
"It's the first time I can remember sitting down at the table [with] managing partners or senior partners of every one of the large firms," he said.
Hill jokes that one of the major challenges Georgia Appleseed faces is "we haven't perfected human cloning yet" to help take on all the work. "There's so much energy around this. It's just exciting, and it's wonderful.
Right now, Georgia Appleseed's challenge is to figure out appropriate growth that's responsible."