The executive director of New Haven’s crusading legal aid agency is stepping down, and the agency is looking for a new leader.
Current Executive Director Susan Garcia-Nofi is leaving the agency, the New Haven Legal Assistance Association, to return to practicing law, with legal aid in Springfield, Mass.
Deputy Director Alexis Smith will serve as interim chief of the State Street-based agency while it seeks a permanent new executive director. (Applicants can send resumes and letters of interest to the search committee at this email address.)
NHLAA has a long history of helping poor people obtain justice through the courts over the past 52 years. Click here, here, here and here to read about some of its most recent work representing immigrants victimized by wage theft and tenants confronting unlivable conditions in federally subsidized housing.
The agency’s 34 lawyers and paraprofessionals serve people in Greater New Haven and the lower Naugatuck Valley.
Garcia-Nofi “has been a wonderfully competent leader of NHLAA for four years, and we will miss her,” board President Beverly Hodgson is quoted as saying in a press release. “She leaves NHLAA in solid shape. Many of us have made career changes, and I think we all understand the pull of client representation and must support Susan’s desire to return to direct help to those who need it.”
I sincerely wish I had gone to law school. For this job, I would love to see someone charismatic like Yale's Van Jones take over justice-seeking and fund-raising...maybe he would be willing to come back to this town that needs him.