Lawyer gets public service award for helping homeless
Jackie Dowd laughed at the thought of more than 12 people coming to celebrate her achievement.
On June 15, much to her surprise, about 100 people showed up at a Baldwin Park community center to celebrate the Orlandobased lawyer being honored with the Florida Bar Foundation’s Jane Elizabeth Curran Distinguished Service Award.
“I was just completely blown away,” Dowd said. “The idea that people I work with and volunteer with would take the time and go out of their way to nominate me for something is still kind of baffling.”
Dowd received the award last Thursday in Boca Raton during The Florida Bar Foundation’s 43rd annual reception and dinner at the Florida Bar Annual Convention.
The award was created in 2015 and named after the foundation’s first executive director to recognize an individual who has significantly increased access to civil justice for the poor in Florida.
As a lawyer and legal counsel for IDignity, an organization that helps people access documentation, Dowd has helped more than 21,000 people in Central Florida get birth certificates, marriage records, social security
records, immigration records and other documents needed to get an ID in Florida.
“Jackie has changed the lives of thousands of homeless and lowincome individuals by providing legal advocacy that would otherwise be unavailable,” recently retired Chief Judge Frederick J. Lauten said in a letter supporting Dowd’s nomination for the award, according to the foundation. “… You will find few others who have dedicated more of their time, energy and passion to the representation of the poor and homeless in Central Florida.”
Dowd provides legal support that makes it possible for those in difficult situations to get an ID, so they can drive, get a job, rent a
home, open a bank account, apply for food stamps and anything else that requires legal identification.
“Navigating the midwife who can’t spell or the father who didn’t marry mom until after you were born and it’s her maiden name on the birth certificate, that’s the harder stuff than scraping up $25 to get a new ID,” Dowd said.
Before Dowd was a lawyer, she was a journalist working for newspapers. She changed paths, graduating from law school at the University of Florida in 1987 and began her legal career representing General Motors before moving to the Florida Attorney General’s office. In 2005, Dowd established the Florida A&M University College of Law’s Homelessness and Legal Advocacy Clinic.
“I started thinking about people whose voices aren’t heard in
the justice system,” Dowd said.
Dowd founded the nonprofit poverty and social justice firm Legal Advocacy at Work to handle cases of collections, evictions, family law, public benefits and employment for the poor and homeless.
In 2006, at an event to help the homeless, she got together a group of lawyer friends and students and set up a table to provide legal advice. That day she said she found a line wrapped around the gym and out the door, full of people with legal questions about identification.
She said the idea for IDignity was born.
Dowd recalled spending a couple years helping an iron union worker who lost his ID. He struggled getting a new one because was born while his father was deployed in the military and had a German birth certificate.
“It gets kind of scary today with all the controversy with immigration if you can’t prove that you’re a U.S. citizen,” Dowd said.
Dowd said she helped him fight for years to get a new ID. By going through national archives, they found a letter from his father while he was deployed, proving that, despite his German birth certificate, he was an American citizen.
When she moved into public service law, Dowd said she learned that she couldn’t win by just knowing more than the other side, she had to tell compelling stories of the people she was representing.
“Now, it needs to be about people,” Dowd said. “And our system should be about people.”