The Center’s innovative program to help Spokane’s neediest gets a morning to show where it’s been, and explain where it’s going.
It says something about Charlene Hunt that she can begin a story about her life-shattering ordeal with alcohol by getting a laugh about what even a terrific college education won’t get you sometimes.
“I put myself through school. I graduated with honors in Sociology, minors in 
Anthropology and Psychology with an emphasis on Women’s Studies,” she told an audience of close to a hundred people Wednesday morning. “So, as you can anticipate, I was giving plasma at the plasma center because I couldn’t find any work.”
The story goes on from there. The tall, young woman in her only blue dress, walking down one of Spokane’s longer streets determined to get someone to hire her, then finding herself a successful business woman, and business owner, and traveling the country. Her problems with drinking started when she learned her father had what turned out to be terminal lung cancer. She was laid off from one job, fired from another, and then found herself living without money, but also with a new daughter and a still escalating drinking problem. And then a custody battle to keep her daughter.
Shortly after being admitted to Spokane treatment center for women, she said, the other women told her about the Center for Justice. She walked in and saw, on the wall, a poster framing a passage from African-American poet and essayist Audre Lorde: “When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, it becomes less and less important whether I’m afraid.”
The passage stuck with her. And so did the Center for Justice.
“So, I walked in,” she said. “They took me on. And I have to tell you, they expected a lot. They expected me to stay in my program. But what they gave me more than anything else is that they gave me a sense of hope, they gave me a sense of power, and even a sense of respectability. And I hadn’t had that in a very long time.”
Charlene, today, is once again a successful businesswoman and a member of the Center’s board of directors.
Her passionate and at times emotional talk was for the cause of explaining the difference that the Center’s Community Advocacy program makes in the lives of the hundreds of people whose cases have been worked by CFJ lawyers, social workers, and law students over the past five years.
It’s largely unheralded work because, unlike the Center’s litigation efforts, it doesn’t make the news the way a federal court ruling or a state supreme court decisions will make.
“We have big issues and big cases and all that sort of thing,” explained CFJ 
founder, Jim Sheehan, in his opening remarks. “And those things can create a place where you get lost just in ideas and concepts and you aren’t really grounded. Community Advocacy is what keeps us grounded. It’s where we keep our feet on the floor and represent real people with real issues, and we learn as much from them as they learn from us.”
Taking all this in, a few feet from the podium, was Suellen Pritchard, a former Center client herself whose personal story resembles Charlene Hunt’s. Suellen helped design the CA program and directs it. As CFJ’s chief catalyst Breean Beggs pointed out, there’s a purposeful and intangible element to how the Center tries to engage CA clients. As much as she administers the program, Suellen also sets the tone for the human element behind that engagement.
Zane Williams, a grandfather, a professional meat cutter, and a man who was baptized in the Spokane County Jail while serving time for drug offenses, spoke after Charlene Hunt. For him, the Center offered help getting over the obstacles that awaited him when he was released from prison. Among other things, he needed to get his driver’s license back so he could get to where he could work.
“I called down and talked to Suellen and I remembered Suellen from other adventures,” he said, “so I wasn’t afraid to tell her that I needed help. She opened her arms like she does with everybody else and went to work on it. I got my license back, got my life back. And life’s good. I just want to thank Jim Sheehan, because he saw a need, in Spokane, and he followed through with that need.”
City Council President and Spokane lawyer Joe Shogan was introduced by Beggs as a citizen legislator “with a heart for people.”
“So, I walked in. They took me on. And I have to tell you, they expected a lot. They expected me to stay in my program. But what they gave me more than anything else is that they gave me a sense of hope, they gave me a sense of power, and even a sense of respectability. And I hadn’t had that in a very long time.”–Charlene Hunt.
“The Center for Justice fills a real niche,” Shogan said. “I used to think that the late, great Carl Maxey filled a niche in this city. Carl was known for taking cases that no one else would take, some of them involving the police department and some of them involving you name it. But probably unpopular cases. And I used to say that without Carl being an avenue for people having their rights advocated, that we would have a real gap in this city, of disenfranchised people who felt no benefit from our system of justice. So, the Center for Justice fills that gap in a lot of ways. They do take on cases involving advocacy for the poor, for the voiceless, for the nameless, for the faceless. And for that I applaud them. So, if Breean weren’t such a pain in the ass, I suppose we could go out and play golf together. But I don’t play golf very well. And that’s his job. His job is to make people like myself uncomfortable, if there’s a need to do so.”
Beggs, who laughed as much as anyone else when the Council President called him “a pain in the ass” followed Shogan, and offered his take on where Community Advocacy is headed, and why. He began by talking about where CA fits in the Center’s broader mission and how it was conceived as a way to bring together the tools of lawyers and social workers. One of the things he emphasized is how CA gives young law students and interns opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise get to work on.
“By the time they’re done with their work work,” he said, “they have become empowered and knowledgeable advocates and then they go out, whether they’re with the Center or not, and help people negotiate solutions to their problems. There’s something that clicks on and it’s not just what justice and injustice is. They have a commitment to making a real difference.”
He then turned to the specifics of the program and how it is shifting to meet new needs.
“What we do is look at what’s not being done,” he said. “And the big issues that are really affecting the poor in this town have to do with driver’s licenses and computer data bases. The state revokes four hundred thousand driver’s licenses a year, in the state. These are people who are too poor to pay their tickets. And then they get pulled over, they get arrested, they have to get a public defender, and they go to jail. And it keeps going. And the debt goes higher. And so we’ve really ramped up our driver relicensing program, that takes people to court, gets them on a payment plan that they can afford, and gets them a driver’s license, so that they’re legal and getting their lives back. In order to do that, they have to demonstrate to use and then later the judge, that they’re ready to do that, that they’re not on the downward spiral. But if they’re ready to respond, as you’ve heard some folks here today say, then it gives them a chance to do that. We do twenty or thirty of those a month, and each one makes a huge difference.
As for the computer records, Beggs said, the problem is either bad or distorted information that gets into a credit report, or other file, and then becomes used to deny them jobs and other opportunities.
“This stuff follows people, and it drives them further into poverty,” he said. “And then they’re more likely to go down the wrong road.”
Not surprisingly there was a long line of people waiting for Suellen Pritchard as the plates and silverware from the benefit were being gathered and hauled away.
“Even though I work with social service agencies a lot, we’re always in the grind of what we’re doing,” said when asked about the gathering. “And so, it’s not really
clear to them. We just make the phone call and say, ‘hey, can you help me.’ Or they make the phone call and ask if we can help them. We don’t really sit down and go into depth about what we do. So probably a hundred people got a new awareness of what we do on a daily basis.”
With that she excused herself and explained she had to be across the river at a meeting in ten minutes.
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