Building My Practice

-- By AimeePacheco - 27 Apr 2022

Introduction

I have essentially been building a practice for more than 10 years now. I was 11 years old when I took my first risk and stepped in front of a podium at my local church, asking church members to invest in me as I asked for donations to participate in a legal program. At that point, I did not have more to offer than a promise to give back to the community in the future. 12 years later, I have stayed true to my promise. I have continued to stay involved with my local church: organizing community resource events, connecting members to legal resources, and offering legal education material and presentations. These community members have remained updated on my legal journey and professional growth every step of the way.

My Positionality and The Vision

My ultimate goal is to bring more legal accessibility to underrepresented immigrants and workers in the rural South by providing legal resources, tools, education, and legal services. As a first-generation, low-income, pansexual, Indigenous (Maya K'iche') Latina, oldest daughter of immigrants, care-giver, survivor of sexual violence, and community organizer born and raised in rural Georgia, I believe that my life experiences and identities give me a unique positionality in this work.

My "Why?"

My interest in immigration law is rooted in my own personal experiences. At age eleven, my life took a turn when ICE showed up to my house to detain and deport my father. It was at this age, as I spoke to my father across a screen in a cold detention center, that I realized how unfair the United States immigration system could be. Thus began my journey in legal immigration research. Knowing that my family was always at risk of being deported, I researched deportation defense and family law, where I discovered the use of "power of attorney" letters for worst-case scenarios and the possibility of me petitioning for my mother once I turned 21 years old. While I was still young, I knew that I did not want to have to depend on anyone else to determine mine or my family's fate.

Building the Practice

Building the Skills

It was these life experiences that ultimately shaped my career path as I based my college majors, internships, and leadership opportunities entirely on a vision of one day becoming the best immigration attorney and community advocate I could be. I sought the most challenging Spanish courses to improve my Spanish interpretation skills. I joined every student immigration organization and took every immigration class Dartmouth had to offer and eventually found myself learning to code with R and using ArcGIS? , a type of mapping software, to create maps that gauged legal accessibility for immigrants in Georgia based on the locations of immigrant populations, legal offices, immigration offices, and detention centers in the state. Now, in law school, I hope to be equipped with more tools that will allow me to better advocate for my communities. I plan on participating in the courses/clinics/externships/student groups/activities directly relevant to my practice. This means learning about the various fields of law that immigration intersects with: criminal law, family law, international law, labor law, health law, and more. This also means strengthening my legal writing, reading, and researching skills.

Establishing the Foundations

After graduating from college, I gained experience in the non-profit world through two organizations. Both organizations taught me how quickly a practice can become chaotic when the foundation itself is shaky. No workers' manuals, no official non-profit certification, no board members, no website, no social media. At both organizations, I built all of the social media pages from scratch. Eventually, I was able to see the official processes such as creating a board and assigning roles, taking steps for 501(c)(3) status certification, grant writing, drafting mission statements and bios for brochures. Since then, I have begun brainstorming ideas for my practice when for when I take all of the same steps.

Navigating the Challenges

Partners

My partners, for better or worse, will include my family members.My 16-year old sister also aspires to become an immigration attorney, while my 21-year old brother is studying business administration to run our finances. As the organization grows, I envision my other partners all being immigrants or children of immigrants themselves, BIPOC, first-gen, from the South, and/or queer. Having said this, one of my biggest lessons at my last organization, came from seeing the co-founding team of three good friends dissolve and learning right before my eyes the importance of choosing your partners. I am still learning how to anticipate and prepare for potential issues in the future.

Funding

Luckily, finding clientele will not be an issue. My biggest issue is figuring out how to do the work without charging clients for the services but still making enough money to run the business with adequate pay and insurance benefits to all employees. I will not be given a $1 million fund to kickstart this organization the way the co-founders of my last organization were. However, for that organization, I created a "Funding Sources" spreadsheet with every relevant grant and donor application I could find. I knew I could broaden the scope since we covered immigration law, criminal law, and labor law but also focused a lot of our efforts on educating community members and other advocates. The greatest challenge, however, was finding sources that would not ask us to comprise our values or goals; they had to be able to see the vision. This is the process I expect to once again go through to kickstart the organization. Apart from grant writing, I am at a loss on how to create more funds. While I know I will have an attorney salary post-graduation and that I have skills doing written and live translations, and I have worked a number of "side-hustle" jobs, but nothing seems enough for the amount of money I will need to kickstart this practice.

An excellent start. When I offer Planning Your Practice next, in fall '23 we could work together on perfecting this very promising plan.

The best route to improvement is to remove the past and concentrate on the future. The most important things to write down are the things you don't know. Framing good, basic questions is the most valuable skill you have right now. Let's use the next draft to start unearthing and investigating those questions. One, how to think about running a family practice, is already evident. But there are certainly more given your perceptive and long-maturing account.

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