Like the father of a newborn, I spent the weekend thinking about my hopes and dreams for this blog.  Then, I went into social worker mode.  Something I always say to my clients rung out, “You gotta have a plan.  Drive a stake in the ground ahead of you and keep walking toward it.  If you don’t have that stake, you’ll just wander all over the place and you’ll tag along with the first person you meet who does have a stake, for better or for worse.”  And, true to form, that has been my struggle with getting this blog rolling.  I had no agenda.  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. And, as you can see, the entries up to this point are really random.  Well, no more.  I am driving this blog’s stake in the ground.

I would like to use this blog to begin documenting the process of Holistic Advocacy as we have been practicing it at Sumpter & Gonzalez.  When we started our strategic planning process to move to a new type of criminal defense, we had a real struggle with finding who was doing what out there and how they were doing it.  We did a lot of research.  There definitely were not a lot of academic articles on the interaction between criminal defense and social work.  The two main articles which directly involved our vision were written by Robin Steinberg and Lynn Barenberg.  We would hear from other professionals that certain organizations were doing something similar to our vision.  Then, we had to start cold calling people to try to ask them questions that informed our process.  This actually worked out well.  It was a great way to network as a young professional and all the people we talked to were fantastic (Special thanks to Lynn Barenberg and Norma Wassel).  As far as we know, there are only a hand full of organizations that practice criminal defense AND have a social work staff.  There are many criminal defenders who have JD/MSW degrees, but we were really looking for programmatic developments.  There are many, many other legal organizations who use social workers such as legal aid, family law, social security lawyers, and schools of law; but very few in criminal defense.  Further, all of the criminal defenders that we could find that had social work programs were public defenders - no private firms.  For us, a private firm, this makes all the difference in the world.  We are not a non-profit and we have no public funding streams.  Essentially, we are doing a ton of additional work with no additional funding.  Regardless, the point is that we had to start from scratch.  Now, just 9 short months later, we’ve come a very long way AND we have a long way to go.

I would now like to start sharing what we’ve learned with the hope that:

• We can help other criminal defenders to launch their social work programs (do it, it makes a lot of sense and it works)
• Others who may be doing this work can share their knowledge with us to help us improve our work
• We can build a community of forensic social workers.

Here’s my working agenda:

1. Why the marriage between social work and criminal defense makes sense
2. How we strategically developed our program
3. The Life of a Sumpter & Gonzalez Case (in step by step installments)

In between postings directly associated with the agenda above, I may:

1. Celebrate some successes
2. Share something I recently learned (to include mistakes I’ve made)
3. Call (beg, plead) for help and guidance

This blog is all about sharing and learning from each other.  Please:

• comment freely
• be very, very critical of our process.  It’s the only way that we’re going to get better.
• share what you know
• ask for clarification or more information in your comments
• share with others who might be interested in this process

In advance, I appreciate everyone’s support and shared knowledge.



(published by dan for Athan Schindler)