Lawyer makes family support her top priority
By Kristina Horton Flaherty
Staff Writer
San Francisco attorney Shannan Wilber has toured juvenile detention facilities
nationwide and talked to children in custody. She has seen some youngsters,
clad only in underwear, locked up in small, packed cells for 24 hours a day.
She has seen broken windows, faulty plumbing and extreme temperatures.
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"Sometimes," she recalls, "it was really shocking."
It also fueled Wilber's push for change. For more than a decade, in various
jobs, Wilber has helped hundreds of foster children, abused youngsters and teenagers
in custody, either representing them directly or fighting for broad-based systemic
reform.
For her efforts, the children's advocate has been selected, along with Kentucky
attorney Kim Brooks, to receive the American Bar Association Livingston Hall
Juvenile Justice award this month at the ABA's annual meeting in San Francisco.
As it turns out, Wilber and Brooks even worked together once in the mid-1990s
on a federal class action lawsuit (Doe v. Younger) that successfully challenged
the conditions and practice of detaining children at an adult jail in Kentucky.
The suit, which sparked statewide reform, was just one of Wilber's efforts to
improve the lot of children who wind up in state custody.
"These are really forgotten kids," Wilber says. "I'm proud and honored to have
the opportunity to have worked on behalf of those kids, to give them a voice."
Wilber's interest in helping families and children goes back decades. As a
social worker in the late 1970s, she worked in domestic violence programs and
at a group home for young children. But after a few years, she says, she felt
as though she wasn't making a difference. So, "sort of on a whim," she wound
up in law school and found her niche.
Fresh out of Santa Clara University School of Law in the mid-1980s, she spent
two years as a clerk for California Supreme Court Justice Allen E. Broussard
and little more than a year at Morrison and Foerster. But then she was offered
the chance to help launch a legal and social services program for children
Legal Advocates for Children & Youth (LACY) in Santa Clara County.
"It was more than a 50 percent pay cut," Wilber recalls. "But that was okay.
It was a real opportunity to start something from the ground up."
It also marked a turning point for Wilber. She was the first directing attorney
for LACY, a program in which lawyers and social workers work together to keep
young clients in safe, stable families, in school and out of foster care and
the juvenile justice system. Two years later, in 1992, she took a job at the
San Francisco-based Youth Law Center where, through policy work and litigation,
she worked to reform juvenile justice systems around the nation. She sought,
for example, to expand the alternatives to detention and to keep children out
of adult jails.
Mark Soler, president of the Youth Law Center, recalls how much Wilber liked
talking to the children at such facilities. "Shannan is someone who listens
well to children," he said. "Then she can channel those children's needs into
action."
Soler, who nominated Wilber for the ABA award, also sees her as someone willing
to go the extra mile. "I think she's one of the finest people I've ever met,"
he said. "She has great empathy for other people . . . and she has a wonderful
perspective on where everything fits in the grand scheme of things."
In 2001, after nearly a decade at the Youth Law Center, Wilber, now 47, became
executive director of Legal Services for Children in San Francisco. She was
at a time in her career, she says, when she felt she could make a greater difference
in such a role.
What she'd like to see in the future is more support for families. The government,
she says, is a "really terrible" parent. "Honestly, if we could support families
so that kids could stay at home and be with their families. I think we'd all
be better off."
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