What are the responsibilities and job description for the Summer 2024 Legal Internship, Family Defense position at CENTER FOR FAMILY REPRESENTATION?
Job Details
Description
About CFR
The Center for Family Representation Inc. (CFR) is an award-winning, innovative law and policy organization that serves primarily Black and Brown families and youth in Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx with an interdisciplinary legal defense model that serves more than 2400 clients every year. CFR was originally founded in 2002 to dramatically change the trajectory of indigent parents being prosecuted by the City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) and our goal is to reduce the harm of family separation and prevent or minimize the time any child spends in foster care. CFR provides interdisciplinary family defense to parents charged by ACS with a model that was unique at our founding and that is now being replicated nationally: we assign every client an attorney and a social work staff member, and teams have the support of parent advocates, who are parents with direct personal experience losing children to foster care and safely reunifying their families. CFR was the first agency in the country to integrate parents with lived experience into legal teams. In 2015, CFR expanded its practice to provide legal and social work services to parents in immigration, civil legal services and criminal defense matters.
In addition, CFR’s Youth Defense Practice represents youth in Queens and Manhattan in Supreme Court Youth Parts, during Probation Adjustment and in Delinquency proceedings in Family Court. CFR’s Community Advocacy Project represents parents during a child protective investigation (prior to court involvement) and assists parents in clearing their names from state maltreatment records. We annually train over 500 practitioners in the city, state and around the country on strategies to promote family preservation and interdisciplinary representation and we provide community based “Know Your Rights” presentations to parents, youth and service providers. We advocate at the city, state and national level for policies that promote parent engagement and justice for youth and families.
About the Internship
Interns will work collaboratively with CFR attorneys and social work staff working in family defense in either the Manhattan or Queens office. Through the family defense practice CFR represents parents in abuse and neglect cases in family court, providing our clients with high quality legal defense and meeting objectives such as keeping children out of foster care, shortening lengths of stay for children in foster care, promoting quality visiting arrangements and insuring that families receive services that are well-tailored to expediting safe and lasting reunification.
Interns will participate in comprehensive training and receive individualized supervision and mentoring. Interns will get direct, hands-on experience with advocacy, client counseling, crisis intervention, negotiation and case management. Interns will pursue individual research and writing assignments, have the opportunity to work on projects related to the specific practice area to which they are assigned, appear on the record in court pursuant to student practice orders if appropriate, and more.
Qualifications
Qualifications
CFR will consider law students with a demonstrated interest in our work.
Application Instructions
To apply, please send a cover letter, resume, writing sample and list of three references to Emily Wall (ewall@cfrny.org) by March 29, 2024. Kindly put "Summer Legal Internship - Family Defense."
