Jerry Lane

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Transcript:  “I started out, actually, as a volunteer in New York City, which is where I’m from. I grew up in a nice, middle-class family, and I didn’t have any experience with poverty. I was in private practice there, and a friend of mine who was running a Legal Aid office asked me to do a little volunteer work in the evenings. I was doing housing work, and I remember getting a restraining order preventing a marshal from evicting a family. I had to be at that home at 8:00 in the morning with the restraining order, realizing that what I had done meant this family, that day, still had someplace to live. That engaged my heart.

Now, there’s a downside to that, of course. I’ve never forgotten … there’s a scene at the end of The Wizard of Oz where the Tin Woodman is saying goodbye to Dorothy and he says, “Now I know I have a heart, because it’s breaking.” The problem with doing work that engages your heart is that you pay a price for that. When you can’t help someone who desperately needs it, when we just don’t have enough people … and that’s been true the whole 39 years I’ve been doing this work. We’ve never had enough staff and volunteers to help everyone who needs it. And that’s very hard, to say no to somebody not because they don’t have any merit to their case, not because they don’t need help, but because we just don’t have enough resources.

So many of the clients I have worked with have had to put up with so much more hardship in their lives than anything that passes as a problem in my life. People whose bodies just don’t work, people who were brought up in families that were very destructive—they didn’t do anything wrong to find themselves in those situations. And so many of them are so generous. They’re often more generous than people who have a great deal more.

The people I do get to work with are extraordinary. And these are all people that are giving, not taking. I consider what I do a privilege, not a sacrifice.

I have two older brothers, so maybe I have always had a fondness for underdogs [laughs].”