Dianne Post

21 July 2005

No Time to Warm Up

As a college student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I was trudging up the hill one cold and slushy spring morning and passed the law school. Outside a group of white male students stood smoking and joking. This was in the 1960s when the civil rights movement and the anti-war movements were both very active and I was involved in both. As I passed the elite boys club, I said, "I could go there if I wanted to." That was my first real thought about going to law school.

Nine years later I was in fact trudging up that same hill but this time going to that very same law school. In the mean time, I had been a parole officer with young offenders in California, gotten a masters degree in psychology and worked with alcoholics and the mentally retarded and emotionally disturbed adults and children. I decided that the problem was not the people but the system and it was the system I was going to fix.

Here I am almost 30 years later and the system is as broke as ever though not for my lack of trying. First I opened my own office taking cases for battered women and children. I borrowed on my life insurance policy and with $700 bought an automatic correcting typewriter which then was quite the modern advancement. I bartered and took baked bread, eggs, chickens and even barbed wire in payment for my services. Being unable to make enough to pay my rent, I tended bar and pumped gas in addition to practicing law.

After four years, I went to work for legal aid doing family law. The day I walked in, I had 50 cases and a court hearing the next day. No time to warm up. Sort of like coming to ERRC! There I created a Domestic Violence Project and managed two offices. After that, I returned to private practice a little more fiscally wise. In addition, I taught in a legal program.

My first opportunity to work abroad was with a program at the American Bar Association and I went to Russia in 1998 for two years as a gender specialist to work on violence against women. I was hooked. Upon my return, I became policy director for a state wide NGO that worked on violence issues but kept looking for another overseas opportunity. In 2003, I went to Cambodia to work with the existing legal aid programs and also to work with violence against women and the increasing problem of sex trafficking and sex tourism. On 15 April 2005, I started as the legal director of ERRC.

Though my time here has been short, I am totally in love with my work and the people I work with. A better group cannot be found. I look forward to many productive and effective years at ERRC and thank them for giving me this great opportunity.