Thomas Silverstein
SSDP Board Application
The Basics
School: University of Virginia School of Law, Alumnus of the College of William and Mary
Email: thom.silverstein@gmail.com
Major(s) / Minor(s) / Areas of study: Law; B.A, 2008, English Literature
Current year in school: 2L
Expected graduation year: 2013
What are your tentative plans after college?
After finishing law school, I hope to litigate impact civil rights cases involving housing and lending discrimination, preferably in D.C. At some point, I would also like to find a way to make time for my creative writing pursuits amid a busy schedule.
Leadership Experience
Describe your advocacy skills and experience. Include work outside of SSDP.
As an undergraduate at William and Mary, I participated in the planning and execution of advocacy campaigns in the areas of drug policy and worker's rights. My SSDP chapter successfully convinced the administration to adopt a Good Samaritan Policy through frequent meetings and consultation. A collaborative approach does not work on every issue and with every administration. In order to combat the imposition of a six-day work week for housekeeping staff at William and Mary, we had to stage demonstrations and shame the administration into doing the right thing. To get the administration to adopt an anti-sweatshop policy for licensed apparel, we made use of petitions, guest speakers to educate students on the issue, demonstrations, and engagement with the administration. Since college, I have primarily pursued advocacy goals through litigation, lobbying, and coordination with grassroots organizations. Although the civil rights organization that I worked for between college and law school was not a grassroots organization, both it and its grassroots allies benefited from the synchronization of expertise and resources between groups seeking similar ends.
How do you plan on balancing a busy schedule as a student, an SSDP activist, and a board member?
Since I have been on the Board, I have not had difficulty balancing my competing interests and have played an active role in the Board's activities. Additionally, my activity level in SSDP as a chapter leader has increased rather than decreased since I have joined the Board. Although I am a full-time student and have many interests, I have structured my academic schedule in such a way as to optimize my ability to pursue projects like SSDP Board service, with class only three days a week. Additionally, since I have pursued relatively aggressive course schedules over my first three semesters of law school, I will only have to take thirteen credits a semester over the remaining three in order to graduate. I have no doubt that, if elected, I would continue to effectively balance the different demands on my time.
SSDP Chapter Experience
What formal positions have you held in your SSDP chapter? When? I am in the process of founding the University of Virginia School of Law chapter and am leading that chapter through its preliminary stages. From January of 2007 through May of 2008, I was the primary liaison between the College of William and Mary chapter and both our school's administration and SSDP's national office. During that time as well during the preceding two years of my involvement, our chapter operated non-hierarchically, and designated leadership positions did not denote added responsibility or decision-making authority within the group. We determined our strategic direction and planned our actions by consensus arrived at through discussion. I was consistently one of the most actively engaged participants in those discussions.
Describe your leadership style, particularly within your chapter. At the time that I attended William and Mary, progressive and radical student groups at the school strongly emphasized the importance of non-hierarchical, consensus-based organizing. Most of the groups with which I was involved rotated the tasks of facilitating and note-taking among their memberships. As a result of that formative experience, I am most comfortable when eliciting the input of others and working toward solutions that are not purely my own. My experiences as a civil rights paralegal and legal aid intern have reinforced that tendency as I have discovered the proper balance between allowing a client to tell his or her story and stepping in to guide the narrative process to make it more fruitful. At the same time, I have also led organizations that were either hierarchical in structure or experiencing crises with respect to membership levels. Those experiences have given me a roadmap for ensuring productive organizing under circumstances that, in my view, are less than ideal.
Describe one project that you led or are leading. What was/is your role? What has this project accomplished? As mundane as it may sound in light of the more dramatic success that William and Mary had in obtaining a Good Samaritan Policy while I was a student, I am most proud of the role that I played in educating my then fellow William and Mary students about their rights in police encounters. No matter how tired some chapter members may have gotten of seeing Busted, I insisted, year after year, that we had to keep showing it because, if even one new student saw it, we did a good deed. Those frequent Busted screenings, sometimes accompanied by a question and answer session with a local criminal defense attorney, changed the discourse on students' rights at William and Mary in a real way. Most concretely, at our urging, our Student Assembly printed and disseminated two cards to all students, one containing information about encounters with residence life officials and the other encounters with the police. During my senior year of college, a newly created Student Assembly Department of Student Rights created the latter card, that concerning police encounters. At the time, I served as Undersecretary for the Campus Police within the Department of Student Rights, a position created through my urging and which was passed down to a fellow SSDPer upon my graduation. Far more immeasurably, I do not doubt for a second that there are people who saw the film or received those cards who were able to avoid the cost and stigma of arrest or other disciplinary stigma as a result.
What fundraising or revenue building experience have you had in the past? As an undergraduate student, I led four different student organizations at various times and, in those leadership roles, was responsible for maintaining the solvency of those organizations. To accomplish that aim, I planned a wide range of revenue generating efforts, from formal funding proposals to student government or the administration to fee-admission events like concerts and dance parties. After college, I worked for two years at a medium-sized legal nonprofit in D.C. and assisted in researching and drafting grant proposals and maintaining relationships with large individual donors. Both of those sources of financial support were necessary to the continued prosperous existence of our existence and, by extension, the fates of our clients. In my spare time as an alumnus and graduate student and now as a member of the Board, I have honed my ability to make donation asks of people within my social, familial, and professional networks. As a Board member, I have become actively involved in SSDP's fundraising efforts by joining the Board's Fundraising Committee, volunteering to spearhead the Board's research of institutional funders (as opposed to individuals), and arranging a fundraising training for the Board, staff, and chapter leaders in attendance at SSDP's most recent strategy summit.
The Board
Why do you want to serve on the SSDP board?
When I applied for my current spot on the Board back in April, I was driven to do so by three desires. I wanted to take a more active role in raising funds for the organization. I wanted lend the perspective that I have from years of racial and economic justice advocacy work (not confined to drug policy reform) to strategic discussions. Lastly, I wanted to become more engaged in the drug policy reform movement than I had been since I phased myself out of the task of facilitating regional collaboration in the former Southeast Region in December 2008.
At this point, after about five months on the Board, I can say two things without hesitation. First, serving on the Board has been all that I hoped that it would be and more. Second, I have so much work left to do and so many projects unfinished, and, while I would certainly continue to do that work in the event that I am not elected to a full term, continued service on the Board would give me the best platform to do that work effectively.
What do you believe are the board's most important functions?
In my experience, the Board's absolute most important function is representing the interests of the students who comprise our chapters in conversations about the direction of the organization. The other work that we do, including fundraising, budget oversight, and making personnel decisions with respect to the Executive Director, is critical, but it is also commonplace. The representation of students on our Board is what makes our Board unique and is part of a broader patchwork of factors that make our organization as a whole so dynamic. We, as an organization, are about empowerment.
What are your goals for your board tenure (be as specific as possible)?
I have two main goals for my time on the Board. First, I want to get to know and hear the stories of as many chapter members as possible and provide a voice that is responsive to their concerns in strategic discussions. Second, chapter members may or may not know that there is a $1,000 annual fundraising goal for all Board members. Through my own fundraising efforts, I want to bring in at least double that amount to the organization. More abstractly, I will be a diligent Board member, missing as close to zero calls or meetings as possible and providing critical input when I feel that would be helpful.
If elected to the board, would you retain a leading role and/or formal position with your chapter?
If elected, I would undoubtedly continue leading my embryonic law school chapter. In fact, while I started the process of completing the paperwork necessary to create a student organization at UVA Law before my appointment to the Board, I have actually made far more headway since my appointment. In my experience, serving on the Board has made me even more energized to work on drug policy reform issues rather than contributing to activist burn-out. I would also love to plant the seeds of the rebirth of the UVA undergraduate chapter before my graduation from law school in May 2013.
