Use Your Skills for the Greater Good – Introducing the PDC Volunteer Corps

April 14, 2021

Nonprofits want a “you” on their staff.  Law firms, law schools, and companies are often in the lucky position to employ experts in training, curriculum design, and adult education—in other words, YOU, PDC members.  But our colleagues in the nonprofit sector rarely have these resources due to stretched budgets, limited staff, and reliance upon donations for operational expenses.  As a result, nonprofits typically have their in-house staff create trainings and materials that are “good enough” and often ripe for improvement.

The PDC is full of people who know how to do this.  Enter the PDC’s latest innovation, the PDC Volunteer Corps.  In a pilot program this spring, the PDC Volunteer Corps will allow PDC volunteers to provide free, limited consulting to nonprofit legal service organizations who need assistance redesigning training programs for volunteer attorneys or law students.  This program, the first of its kind for the PDC, leverages the expertise of PDC members to create positive social impact.  Examples of projects in the pilot phase include a legal aid organization in New York looking to shorten its on-demand training for a litigation clinic, a nonprofit in Chicago whose staff would like coaching on making their training more interactive, and a veterans’ legal clinic in Boston in the process of updating its training manual for the first time since 1982.  To be clear, the service is training design consulting, not legal counseling and not reviewing the substance of the training. 

How does it work? Nonprofits submit a short intake form describing their project request.  The PDC matches accepted requests with two PDC Volunteer Corp consultants (likely from different firms/schools) who:

1. review the request and the related materials,
2. have an initial phone call with the organization to ask questions and get additional information,
3. work with each other to craft recommendations and send a Summary of Recommendations form to the organization, and
4. have a final phone meeting with the organization to go over the recommendations and provide further details as needed. 

We want you!  If you are willing to be a volunteer consultant in our pilot, please email PDC Staff at info@pdclegal.org.  Projects are starting in April 2021 on a rolling basis.  All work is virtual.