大卫·欧博伊尔著
April 23, 2018
Since Tristia Bauman was 12 years old, she was told she would make a great lawyer. She loved debating ideas and helping the underdogs in life. “I’m sensitive to equality and fairness,” says Bauman. “I’m the type of person who spoke up for the bullied kids in school.”
As a senior attorney at the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, Bauman battles for the underdogs every day while working to shape public policy to preserve and protect the rights of the homeless.
十多年了, 鲍曼曾是一名公益靠谱的滚球平台, starting out as an attorney at the Legal Services of Greater Miami, Inc. and, later, as an assistant public defender in Miami-Dade County.
Bauman’s passion for combatting poverty and homelessness is personal. 作为一个小孩子, her father fell while lifting a picnic table during a camping trip and slipped a disc. The medical procedure used to treat the disc caused severe damage to her father’s spinal cord, 让他残疾，饱受慢性疼痛. He had to leave his job as an executive director of a nonprofit health clinic in King County, Washington, 再也不能工作了.
“That showed me that you can do everything right and still end up precariously housed and in a situation where you are very poor,” says Bauman. “It showed [me] how easily you can end up on the verge of having your life destabilized without having made a single wrong choice.”
As a student at the University of Washington School of Law, Bauman knew she wanted to work as a public interest lawyer with a focus on housing issues. She took every course she could that involved civil rights, human rights, and poverty-related issues. Instead of following her classmates onto moot court teams or to summer associateships at big law firms, she sought internships with nonprofit legal organizations.
“I wouldn’t necessarily recommend my path to others as the path, 但我确信这是适合我的工作,” says Bauman.
在她法学院的第一年之后, 鲍曼前往安克雷奇, Alaska, 去圣约之家实习, 为无家可归的青少年提供法律服务. That experience solidified her interest in working on housing issues and homelessness.
在法学院的第三年, she interned with the Public Defender Association in Seattle, where she witnessed the populations she sought to advocate for get caught up in a system that was inherently unfair. The experience ultimately inspired her to find a job as a public defender after she finished her degree.
在她的职业生涯中, Bauman says she experiences a pull between a desire to work on housing issues and homelessness on a larger scale — like advocating for more effective, compassionate housing policies at the local and national level — and a desire to help clients on an individual basis.
After extensive experience as a public defender and as a public interest lawyer working on public policy advocacy, Bauman concedes that there is no one type of career that she can confidently say makes the greatest impact. “A career spent advancing impactful policies is not more valuable than a career full of helping people to regain their freedom or get housing. 我们所有人都可以发挥作用，”她说.
However, Bauman says, the pace of change can be frustrating when advocating for new policy related to poverty and homelessness.
“When you’re trying to get people to think about homelessness in a constructive way, and they’re still stuck on the idea that all homeless people choose to live outside because they’re drug addicts, 这是令人沮丧的,” says Bauman. “You realize we’re not even at square one in discussing solutions. 我们仍在消除神话."
While working to change public opinion and shift public policy on housing issues and homelessness can be frustrating, 鲍曼发现她的工作非常值得.
“Seeing the lightbulb go off on in the mind of a lawmaker when you convince them about how and why using police responses to unsheltered homelessness will never work and will always be a waste of taxpayer dollars feels great. But, 最重要的是, it feels good to see people who are too often powerless stand up for their rights, 为了他们的尊严, and for justice. It is amazing to spend each day being part of that,” Bauman says.
