2017 PBN Hummingbird Award

Laura Hardwicke, 2017 Hummingbird Award Recipient

Laura Hardwicke, one of the Pro Bono Network’s most active volunteers, recently received the Hummingbird Award for her work on numerous projects with PBN over the past few years. Laura started working with PBN in the summer of 2015, and since then she has worked on approximately ten PBN projects. She has been particularly active in the Incarcerated Mother’s Clinic and the Adult & Juvenile Expungement Projects, taking on the role of Project Manager for PBN’s Juvenile Expungement Pilot Project.

Laura’s passion for juvenile justice comes from her firm belief that “kids are kids, no matter what,” which she has learned first-hand from raising four children of her own. After finishing law school in the mid-1990s, she went to work for a large law firm for a brief period of time before starting her family. From that point, she was primarily a stay-at-home parent, going in and out of various volunteer work and legal work, including teaching legal writing at Loyola Law School and clerking for a judge. When her youngest child was in middle school she found Pro Bono Network, and she was finally able to do the kind of work she had wanted to do since law school. She says that “public interest [law] was always something I wanted to do, but I never got there” until joining the Pro Bono Network.

Her first major project after joining the Pro Bono Network was to put together PBN’s impact statement, explaining how PBN mobilizes people who wouldn’t otherwise provide legal assistance. While working on this impact statement, Laura saw how all of PBN’s projects reach an essential part of the legal aid landscape, and she then began to dive in to work on as many of those projects as possible. She has worked on orders of protection, divorce, and housing voucher cases, to name a few, but she has found working with incarcerated mothers and in the expungement projects to be the most rewarding of all of the work she has done with PBN. “I’m a big believer in second chances,” she says, “and to be constricted by a stupid mistake you’ve made, I just don’t think that’s where we need to be.”

Laura’s passion for working with incarcerated mothers and in the expungement projects is partly tied in with the way this work connects with her deep concern for racial justice. She is involved in equity initiatives at OPRF High School, as well as in District 90 (River Forest) where she sits on an equity committee. She sees working towards education equity, racial justice, and criminal justice as intertwined, with all of these things part of the same system. “When you look at who is disproportionately affected [by] and in the [criminal justice] system … it’s not right, and it’s important to me to work towards fixing that.” Whether it’s going to jail just to listen to people tell their stories or giving people direct assistance to fix their legal situation, Laura Hardwicke finds her work with PBN to be very powerful and important and she plans to continue that work as long as she can.

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