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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 6, 2005
CONTACT:
Tracy Schroth
Director of Communications
(510) 835-8098, x3013
(Oakland, CA) - The National Center for Youth Law (NCYL) is pleased to announce that third-year law students Bryn Martyna, and Laura Townsend have just been awarded fellowships from the Skadden Fellowship Foundation and Equal Justice Works, respectively, and will join the NCYL staff this fall.
Skadden fellow Martyna will assist Senior Attorney Bill Grimm in implementing the settlement in Braam v. State of Washington, a class action on behalf of foster children in Washington State. The settlement calls for broad reform of the child welfare system, with a focus on protecting children from the emotional harm caused by moving them repeatedly from one foster home to another. Martyna will work with an expert oversight panel and state child welfare officials in the first two years of a seven-year reform effort that will affect thousands of foster children in Washington.
Currently a third-year law student at Stanford Law School, Martyna has clerked at the San Francisco Public Defender's Office, and interned at Legal Services for Children in San Francisco. She has been a Stanford Public Interest Law Fellow for the past two years.
The Skadden Fellowship Foundation this year awarded 28 of the highly prestigious, two year fellowships to judicial clerks and future law school graduates. All fellows work on projects of their own choosing, which help the poor or disadvantaged. The Skadden Fellowship Foundation, funded by the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, pays fellows' full salary, benefits, and all of their student loans during the fellowship period. This is the eighth Skadden fellow received by NCYL, among the highest number received by any single organization in the country.
"We are very appreciative of the continued support from Skadden. The work we do would not be possible without it," said NCYL Director John O'Toole. Equal Justice Works Fellow Laura Townsend will carry on NCYL's work in the juvenile mental health courts, which divert youth with psychological problems from juvenile prisons to community-based programs that provide needed mental health care. Townsend will continue NCYL's efforts to incorporate civil attorneys in the mental health court process, which now include public defenders, prosecutors, judges and mental health workers. The purpose of these attorneys is to provide direct representation to adolescents and their families on matters outside juvenile court jurisdiction, such as securing public benefits, participating in special education hearings, and sealing juvenile records, with the goal of improving the success of community treatment.
A pilot project in Santa Clara County, CA, which NCYL helped develop, has been extremely successful, and courts across the country have been adopting similar models. Townsend's specific goal is to get three courts in different states to adopt the civil partnership model and secure self-sustaining funding.
A third-year law student at Northwestern University, Townsend did coursework for a PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Illinois. Townsend has interned at Children's Rights in New York, a national non-profit that advocates for foster children, and has clerked for the ACLU of Illinois, and the Cook County Office of the Public Guardian.
The fellowship, funded by the Equal Justice Works in partnership with law firms, corporations and other donors, pays the fellow's full salary and student loans during the fellowship period. Equal Justice Works is a national organization that works to provide equal access to the justice system.
Bryn Martyna and Laura Townsend can be contacted for comment:
Bryn Martyna - (650) 714-9544, bmartyna@stanford.edu
Laura Townsend, (773) 412-4371, l-townsend2005@law.northwestern.edu
The National Center for Youth Law (NCYL) is a private, non-profit organization that uses the law to improve the lives of poor children. NCYL works to ensure that these children have the resources, support and opportunities they need for a healthy and productive future. The Center focuses its work in four areas: safety and protection of abused and neglected children, successful transitions to adulthood for at-risk youth, financial stability for low-income children and families, and health and mental health care.
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