Access to Services Manager, Legal Aid of West Virginia
By Blair Dowler
Kate White’s path to becoming the access to services manager for Legal Aid of West Virginia (LAWV) was paved with her lifelong desire to help others.
Born and raised in Elkins, WV, she enjoyed helping others solve problems. After earning her bachelor’s degree, she embarked on a career path dedicated to serving the Mountain State. While living in Morgantown, she served as an AmeriCorps VISTA at a nonprofit that provided free food, clothing and financial assistance to low-income individuals.
“On a daily basis, I saw people struggling to find affordable housing or access to food,” she recalls. “After that experience, I knew I wanted to focus my legal career on advocating for people in vulnerable situations who often have no voice.”
White decided to attend law school and enrolled at West Virginia University (WVU) College of Law—an experience that reaffirmed her longing to help others.
“Participating in clinic as a third-year law student and actually representing clients for the first time was a memorable experience,” she says. “Whether it was the adoption case or the tenant trying to recover his belongings from the landlord, it was exciting to be in a position of using everything I’d learned to help impact vital decisions in the client’s case.”
After graduating in 2007, White clerked for the Honorable Louis Bloom of the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit in Kanawha County. She was then awarded a two-year fellowship by the Skadden Fellowship Foundation, which provides opportunities for those committed to public interest work to develop and implement projects at public interest organizations. Through the fellowship, White launched a medical-legal partnership with FamilyCare Health Center in Charleston that allowed her to work with health care providers to help resolve legal problems impacting patient health.
After the fellowship, she briefly worked for the West Virginia State Senate’s Health and Human Resources Committee, and in 2012, she returned to LAWV to take on her role of access to services manager. Today, White oversees LAWV’s application line and website and assists clients who have emergency deadlines by providing them with advice and tools to go to court on their own. She also directs the organization’s statewide pro bono program while writing grants and facilitating pro bono training.
“Working with amazing grant writers, I have played a role in helping Legal Aid obtain a number of grants over the last four years that enabled us to gain staff capacity and resources to start new initiatives or projects,” she says.
Her grant writing skills also helped start the Lawyer in the School program at Mary C. Snow West Side Elementary School in Charleston. Through the program, pro bono attorneys hold weekly clinics to provide legal assistance to families at the school. Since the start of the project in 2017, more than 100 pro bono lawyers have provided assistance to more than 200 families.
When flooding and devastation struck the southern part of the state in 2016, she jumped at the chance to lend a helping hand, organizing a pro bono program for attorneys to help flood victims navigate FEMA issues and insurance problems. She also helped organize a group of volunteer attorneys to perform outreach at disaster recovery centers in flooded communities as well as volunteers who helped write legal information on disaster issues for the LAWV website.
White has had a major impact on both LAWV and the state. Those around her recognize her strong leadership and the rigorous fight she puts forth for those in need. In 2016, her efforts were recognized with the LAWV Leadership Award. As a native West Virginian, she will continue the fight for her fellow Mountaineers.
“I am thankful I attended WVU College of Law, where I learned to think about how I can help the state and where I met other professionals with the same mentality,” she says. “West Virginia has its struggles, but West Virginians never give up. Those are qualities my husband and I want our three children to have, and that is one reason why we are raising our family here.”
