March 2006
Joshua Kagan has logged
more hours in volunteer service and advocacy work since graduating
from Jepson in 2002 than most people do in a lifetime. He started by
taking a year off between college and law school to work for
AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC).
The NCCC assigned Kagan
to a 12-member West Coast team composed of 18- to 24-year-olds.
After a one-month training period, Kagan’s team undertook the first
of four major two-month projects. Kagan and his teammates organized
a holiday food drive for the food bank in Sacramento, Calif. In
addition to advertising in the newspaper, NCCC members went
door-to-door asking businesses to put food collection barrels in
their offices, which the NCCC would pick up later and deliver to the
food bank.
Kagan’s second assignment
with the NCCC took him to Mesa, Ariz., where he worked in a variety
of capacities at a transitional housing community for battered women
and their children. One of his duties involved tutoring the children
attending the community’s Boys and Girls Club.
|
Joshua Kagan conducts a basketball clinic for children
from the Mesa, Ariz., transitional housing community. |
Most of the women living
in the community received food stamps, but they couldn’t use food
stamps to purchase such basic necessities as diapers for their young
children. In response, Kagan helped organize a diaper bank for these
women and other qualifying people in Mesa.
Located in the Arizona
desert, the Mesa transitional housing community experienced
difficulty complying with the water restrictions required by law.
Kagan and other NCCC members devised a plan enabling the community
to meet its water restrictions and thereby receive a much-needed tax
break.
Next Kagan and his
teammates traveled to the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where they built
affordable homes for low-income native Hawaiians. Without housing
programs such as the one cosponsored by the Hawaiian Homeland
Program and Habitat for Humanity, sky-rocketing real estate prices
would force native Hawaiians off their ancestral islands, Kagan
said.
Kagan returned to
California for his fourth and final NCCC assignment—fighting forest
fires in Eldorado
National Forest. While professional firefighters battled the
blazes, Kagan and other NCCC members spent long, grueling days
cutting swaths around burning areas with chainsaws to prevent the
spread of the fire.
After completing his
intense, but rewarding ten-month commitment to the NCCC, Kagan
entered law school at the University of San Diego in fall 2003.
There he has continued his volunteer efforts on behalf of people in
need.
During his first year of
law school, for example, Kagan volunteered at the
Guardianship Clinic in downtown San Diego, writing and filing
court briefs to help caring people gain legal custody of children
who had been abused, neglected or abandoned by their parents.
Kagan interned in
Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2004 with the
World Service Authority,
a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping refugees of political
and religious persecution achieve asylum status. He primarily
assisted Kurds who were trying to flee Iraq by doing the legal
research necessary to win their release from prison and gain them
entry into a safe country.
His work with the World
Service Authority sparked an interest in international human-rights
work, Kagan said, and he decided to pursue other advocacy work in
this area. During the spring semester of 2005, he volunteered with a
workers’ rights organization in Tijuana, Mexico.
“Due to significantly
reduced import taxes resulting from the passage of the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),” Kagan said, “large numbers
of assembly plants have sprung up in northern Mexico to support
international companies seeking to benefit from low-paid workers. We
saw a lot of human-rights abuses in these sweatshops where long
shifts, unsafe working conditions and mandatory pregnancy testing
are the norm.”
“We tried to inform the
workers of their rights,” Kagan said, “and we tried to get them to
work together to improve their working conditions. Power is in
numbers.”
A
paper Kagan wrote on human-rights abuses in the Mexican
maquiladora sector will appear in the forthcoming issue of the
Journal of Transnational Law and Policy, a publication of the
Florida State University College of Law.
This past summer, Kagan
took classes in Costa Rica, where he continued his advocacy of
international human rights by completing an unofficial internship
with the
Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Kagan served as the vice
president of the Public Interest Law Foundation (PILF) at the
University of San Diego Law School from February 2005 to February
2006. Because public-interest lawyers earn significantly less money
than most other lawyers, the Public Interest Law Foundation raises
money for the Loan Repayment Assistance Program (LRAP) to help
University of San Diego graduates who work for qualifying nonprofit
public-interest organizations repay their law school loans.
As vice president of PILF,
Kagan promoted public-interest law opportunities to other law
students. For example, he spent a week in New Orleans during winter
break with a group of law students offering legal assistance to the
many immigrant workers from Latin America who have come to the Gulf
Coast to rebuild in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
“Many of these workers
were sleeping in broken-down cars and city parks,” Kagan said.
“Working conditions were poor. Employers would contract undocumented
migrant workers for two-week periods, but at the end of two weeks,
they would call the INS to have the workers deported so they didn’t
have to pay the workers the wages they were due.”
Kagan has organized
another contingent of seven students to accompany him to Jackson,
Miss., during spring break. The law students will do volunteer legal
work for Hurricane Katrina victims at the Mississippi Center for
Justice.
Kagan will graduate from
law school this May and plans to spend this summer preparing for and
taking the Virginia Bar exam. He would like to embark on a political
science doctoral program in the fall, he said, and is currently
waiting to hear about acceptance into several graduate school
programs.
“My ultimate goal is to
become a college professor specializing in international relations
or international human rights,” Kagan said. “If I ever practice law
at all, I will practice public-interest law.”
Kagan knew long before he
entered Jepson that he wanted to help the disadvantaged, but his
Jepson education helped him focus on how he could best do that,
Kagan said. “Classes like Service Learning gave me the insights and
drive to act on my interests and beliefs,” he said. |