Lam Nguyen Ho is the Executive Director of CALA (Community Activism Law Alliance), which he founded with a Harvard Law School Public Service Venture Fund seed grant. He is currently an Echoing Green Global Fellow and will serve as a 2016-2017 Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow.
Prior to founding CALA, he was a staff attorney at Equip for Equality, where he defended the civil rights of people with disabilities. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 2008, Lam joined Chicago’s Legal Assistance Foundation (LAF) through a Skadden Foundation Public Interest Fellowship. During his time at LAF, he established and ran 10 community-based clinics providing free legal services to youth and their families on the west side of Chicago. He experienced firsthand the challenges of community lawyering and civil legal services, and was inspired to innovatively confront these challenges through the creation of CALA.
Lam has received awards for his public service work including the 13th Annual NALP/PSJD Pro Bono Publico Award; the Gary Bellow Public Service Award; the Maria, Gabriella, & Robert Skirnick Public Interest Fellowship; the HLS Dean’s Award for Community Leadership; the Kaufman Pro Bono Service Award; the Beinecke Scholarship; the Point Foundation Scholarship; the Sonnenschein Scholars Summer Public Interest Fellowship; the Lenn Thrower ’83 Memorial Fellowship for Research in Queer Studies; and the Chicago Volunteer Legal Services Volunteer Award.
At Harvard Law School, he was President of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau—the oldest student-run legal services organization in the country; was an editor for the Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review; and completed over 3000 hours of pro bono legal services. He also worked as a research and teaching assistant to Professor Lucie White, helping Professor White to create a new, community-lawyering focused curriculum for Harvard’s Poverty Law course. He holds additional graduate degrees from Brown University, where he completed its 4-year combined M.A./A.B. program, and the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar and Sub-Dean of Wadham College. He was previously Chairperson of the HIV/AIDS Response Review Panel for the State of Illinois. He serves on the Advisory Committee for the Law Project, which provides pro bono transactional legal services needed to strengthen Chicago communities.