It's Time to Grow Our Impact in Houston

Thanks to the Powell Foundation and the New Schools Venture Fund, we are proudly supporting six fellows from Houston-area schools and two fellows who are traveling to Houston for college. This is a good start, but we can do more to support aspiring first-gen lawyers in the area.

Between now and the release of our 2025 Fellowship application in February, we want to find partners who will open the doors to twenty-five additional Houston-area fellows over the next two years. With our objective of helping over half of our participants earn their law degrees within nine years of high school graduation, we can look forward to the development of future legal leaders ready to serve the Houston community. 

Through this work, new families will have access to a legal advocate who can stand up for their rights. When they are faced with immigration, housing, employment, criminal, family law, or other complex issues, they will have a trusted voice to reach out to. This is well beyond shifting faces and demographics, this is a matter of democratizing legal power.

To prepare to open doors for our growing presence in Houston, we helped host the American Bar Association First-Gen Summit at the South Texas College of Law in downtown Houston (April 2024), hired a local law student from the University of Houston Street Law program (July 2024) to provide additional one-on-one mentorship to our local fellows, strengthened our connections to local partners (Break Through Houston, Holocaust Museum, YMCA Youth & Government, NAACP Youth Council Houston Chapter), planning our first official YJA Law Day in Houston for Spring 2025, and working with our Houston fellows to create new experiential learning opportunities for local college students during the academic year.