David Stern (philanthropist/activist)

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David Stern is Chief Executive Officer for Equal Justice Works, a national nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC. He is also former president of the Stern Family Fund, a private foundation that supported policy-oriented government and corporate accountability projects.^[1]

Mr. Stern graduated from Union College in 1982 and the Georgetown University Law Center in 1985. Following law school, he clerked for two federal judges in Baltimore and worked for a public interest law firm before joining Equal Justice Works, then known as the National Association of Public Interest Law (NAPIL). Hired in 1992 to create a postgraduate fellowship program for the organization, Mr. Stern became the executive director in 1995. In the 11 years he has served as head of Equal Justice Works, he has helped the organization’s budget grow more than five-fold. Under his leadership, the staff has grown from just eight employees to 35, and the number of postgraduate fellowships has grown from 20 to more than 130 each year.^[2] Today, Equal Justice Works manages the largest postgraduate fellowship program in the country.^[3] Nearly all of the American Bar Association-accredited law schools in the U.S. are members of Equal Justice Works.^[4]

As president of the Stern Family Fund—the foundation the family operated until 2007—Mr. Stern expanded the work of his father, philanthropist and author Philip Stern.^[5] The Sterns have supported reform efforts that attack the root causes of societal problems rather than simply attempting to alleviate the symptoms of these problems.^[6] Mr. Stern has had a longstanding interest in campaign finance reform and tax fairness^[7], and he served on the board of the Center for Responsive Politics. In this role, he played a part in helping the non-partisan, non-profit research group track money in politics and its effect on elections and public policy. He has also served on the Advisory Boards of the Medical-Legal Partnership for Children and the New Voices Fellowship. Currently, he serves on the Board of Trustees for the Georgetown Day School and the J. Skelly Wright Fellowship Committee at Yale Law School.

In 2006, the Mississippi Center for Justice honored Mr. Stern for his leadership in bringing national attention to the legal needs of hurricane survivors and for creating the Katrina Initiative, an Equal Justice Works project that supported the work of 19 lawyers in the Gulf Coast. These attorneys were placed at organizations in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to help the hundreds of thousands of people left without homes, jobs and social services due to the damage from the hurricanes. Mr. Stern describes the impact of the project in the 2007 short documentary, Survivors of the Storm. Mr. Stern was also recognized in May 2008 as one of the "Greatest Washington Lawyers of the Past 30 Years" by the Legal Times.

[edit] External Links

Equal Justice Works
The Stern Family Fund
Georgetown University Law Center
Medical-Legal Partnership for Children
New Voices Fellowship
Katrina Initiative
Surviving the Storm

[edit] References