Goals and progress
Community investment | Our program in action
Increasing impact
Location: San Francisco
Summary: Our Legal department has found a new way to volunteer that brings valuable skills to our youth-serving community partners.
For nonprofit organizations, legal work can become a daunting expense. For our legal team, this potential problem presented an opportunity. Our lawyers were eager to move beyond scattered volunteer projects to work that would dedicate their professional skills on an ongoing basis to a couple of targeted nonprofits. They started looking for a way to turn what they do every day into vital support for our community partners.
“We really wanted to focus on underserved youth,” says Henry Fong, an attorney in our Employment Law group, who took on the challenge of finding a project. He quickly found plenty of enthusiasm across the department — and among two of our youth community partners.
The Legal team is now working with Breakthrough Collaborative and Youth Uprising.
Breakthrough connects middle school students with talented high school and college students who serve as teachers, role models and mentors, providing real-life examples that it’s “cool to be smart.”
Youth Uprising works to affect positive community change by supporting youth and young adults to achieve their potential. Youth Uprising’s music studio is one way of tapping this potential. Building on their success, our Legal team is helping them start their own record label.
To supplement its efforts, the Legal department brought in volunteers from the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP and the Mills Legal Clinic at Stanford Law School. “It’s important to us that Breakthrough Collaborative and Youth Uprising have broad support and resources,” Henry says, “and together with Orrick and Stanford, we can tap into our collective expertise to tackle just about any legal issue that these nonprofits face.”
Paul Adams, an associate general counsel who helps lead the volunteer effort, notes that Gap Inc. lawyers have a practical perspective that easily translates to the nonprofit world. At the same time, they grow by working with new clients. "It's a very neat opportunity to shift your perspective and interact with a partner like Breakthrough Collaborative. It helps you see things differently,” he says.
To date, 18 lawyers and staff are involved in the pro bono work, logging hours on everything from employment matters to trademark issues and real estate. “People are just jazzed about it,” says Wilma Wallace, a Gap Inc. vice president and associate general counsel. “It’s validating your own decision to become a lawyer. It really brings out positive aspects of the profession.”
