Law students want to offer their skills to work on urgent needs highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, organizations like yours working on the front lines need assistance, but do not have the capacity to support legal fellows. The COVID-19 Rapid Response Systems Summer Institute bridges this gap – connecting the hundreds of interested law student fellows to fill organizational project needs.

Project Types

Fellows will work individually or in teams on projects to ensure that the most vulnerable members of our communities obtain the support they need, including:

  • Direct client work (e.g., law-related work, such as staffing a helpline or assisting individuals with unemployment insurance forms)
  • Legal research/writing
  • Advocacy efforts

The Institute’s Role

The Institute will support your organization by:

  • Assigning fellows with relevant skills to your project, individually or in teams, for short-term or longer-term project work
  • Overseeing fellows, providing assignments, project management, and coordination
  • Providing an orientation and ongoing educational programming to fellows
  • Arranging additional supervision where the partner organization is limited in capacity
  • Offering limited stipends to fellows

We hope that many of our project partners will be able to work closely with our fellows, providing initial instruction and some amount of supervision, feedback, and mentorship as the projects evolve. We understand that some partner organizations will be unable to engage on all of those levels, so we will have structures to supplement as needed: please don’t let limited supervision capacity prevent you from reaching out to us. Although the pandemic is a driving force behind this effort, the projects themselves need not be virus-related. 

If you have a specific project to propose, please submit it on this form.

If you are uncertain about whether your potential project would be a good fit or is adequately developed, please send us a line here. We are eager to hear even vague ideas and to workshop them with you. 

Please email systemssummerinstitute@gmail.com with any questions.

Finally, if you are able to support the work of the Summer Institute, please consider a donation through People’s Parity Project, and allow us to provide more law students the opportunity to work with our partner organizations to support the most vulnerable groups in our society at this vital time. All funds will be used to support fellow stipends to carry out this work.

More information for project partners is available in the following video (recorded on May 5, 2020):

https://youtu.be/OglXyy8cXAo