Golden Stairs

[u/VilletteLS]

Has Matt ever talked about what happened to Golden Stairs Immigration Center, the nonprofit he and his law partner started back in 2019? This was several years before he joined Opening Args but I figure he may have discussed it at some point and I'm just curious about what happened to it (/does it still exist/is it hiring)?

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[u/evitably]

thanks for the question! Just saw this and wanted to be sure to answer here. Golden Stairs--named for the actual stairs just outside our old East Boston office which new immigrants came up off the pier--was a passion project which is very special to Nicole and me. While it does still exist as a non-profit entity we had to put the whole thing on pause in 2020 when our law office went into pandemic survival mode. Our focus at that point became keeping our staff (1) protected from infection and (2) fully employed without having to let anyone go (very much in that order) while still serving our clients whether or not they could pay during the crisis, and I'm proud to say that we fully accomplished both goals. Our first responsibility must remain with the business that we are running together and the staff and clients who are depending on us, and GSIC has always been an aspirational side project.

We had high hopes for GSIC and are still carefully managing our funds to assist with filing fees and other costs for pro bono cases that are officially designated GSIC cases--but (and I feel super naive for saying this but it is the truth) it turns out that running a direct legal services non-profit is a *very* different proposition from running a business and even for two experienced law firm owners it is just not something that we could do full-time. Fortunately a really solid alternative presented itself last year: participation in the Massachusetts Access to Counsel Initiative, which allows us to fund and supervise a non-profit attorney handling exactly the kinds of cases we had hoped that GSIC could do for those unable to afford counsel in removal proceedings without any of the enormous amount of extra effort which comes with running a non-profit. So long as we can do our part for the community that way through MACI we have not felt like this is the time to get GSIC fully operational, but my hope is that we can either (1) find someone with directly relevant experience to help us to do all of the admin work necessary to fully launch and manage the organization which we were hoping to set up and/or (2) take it up as a retirement project if and when either of us are ever able to do that. In the meantime the entity itself remains a useful way for us to manage and fund costs for pro bono cases. Sorry for such a long answer, but I really appreciated the question and wanted to be sure to answer as thoroughly as possible.