The 2009 Meyer Foundation Exponent Award winners are featured in The Washington Post.
About Jonathan M. Smith
Executive Director, Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia
Jonathan M. Smith has served as executive director of the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia since May 2002. He is responsible for program management and participates in litigation.
Smith graduated in 1980 with a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Maine at Orono and received his juris doctor from Antioch School of Law in 1984. From 1984 to 1989, Smith was an associate at the Alexandria Virginia civil rights firm of Victor Glasberg and Associates. During his tenure at the law firm, he litigated cases in a broad range of issues, including: police brutality and misconduct, employment discrimination, discrimination in public accommodation, voting rights and free speech.
In 1989, Smith joined D.C. Prisoners' Legal Services Project as its first staff attorney and helped open the office. In 1991, he became the project's executive director. While at the project he served as counsel in individual and class action litigation. From 1998 until 2002, he was the executive director of the Public Justice Center in Baltimore, where he worked on a range of issues including juvenile justice reform, workers' rights, the rights of language minorities and housing. During his tenure, he helped grow the Public Justice Center's docket and helped establish the Appellate Advocacy Project and the Latino Legal Assistance Project.
Smith has received recognition for his work, including the Justice Potter Stewart Award from the Council for Court Excellence (2006); the Excellence in Chief Executive Leadership Award from the Center for Non-Profit Advancement (2006); and the President's Award from the Washington Council of Lawyers (2006).
Key Accomplishments
Jonathan M. Smith
Executive Director, Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia
Annual Budget: $3.07 million
Service Area: District of Columbia
The Legal Aid Society provides civil legal assistance and promotes stronger legal protections for people in poverty in DC, in areas such as domestic violence, family law, public benefits, eviction prevention, preservation of affordable housing, and consumer law.
Jonathan has served as executive director of Legal Aid since May 2002. As executive director, he has strengthened the organization in significant ways, including hiring more experienced attorneys and retaining them, developing areas of specialization among the legal staff, and hiring a more diverse staff. Since 2002, the organization's budget has tripled and its staff has doubled.
Jonathan has been interested in social justice work since childhood and has spent most of his career working to protect the legal rights of people living in poverty (civil rights law firm; DC Prisoners' Legal Services Project; Public Justice Center in Baltimore).
The Legal Aid Society, under Jonathan's leadership, has put lawyers on-site in some of the most underserved neighborhoods in the District after learning that transportation and access to bus routes kept clients from coming to their offices. It now provides civil legal assistance at five locations: the Superior Court, three community-based offices in Southeast, and downtown DC. It also provides legal rights training and manages volunteers who provide more than 24,000 hours of assistance each year.
Months into the job, he wrote a persuasive article in Washington Lawyer magazine that eventually led the DC Court of Appeals to establish the DC Access to Justice Commission. As a result of the Commission's work, the District has provided more than $10 million over several years to provide legal services for people living in poverty and to establish a shared interpreter bank.
Jonathan also drafted and built a coalition to support legislation which repays law school debt for poverty lawyers.
Jonathan co-chaired the DC Consortium of Legal Services Providers for three years, and in that capacity helped create recommendations that helped secure District funding to add 31 lawyers to the staffs of nonprofit legal service providers. Legal Aid has been responsible for major revisions to DC's custody laws, and has had very important victories in DC Court of Appeals; some cases have had national impact (interpretation of fed housing laws impacting people with mental illness).
Photo Downloads
Headshots by Mike Morgan.
