Profile of Eve Schatz
Preamble: Meeting Eve Schatz has caused me to alter my own rules and widen the scope of individuals I profile for The Practical Altruism Project. When I began this project in September 2024, I planned on writing only about individuals applying their career skills who were performing important work as unpaid volunteers for a nonprofit. Ms. Schatz now makes a well-deserved salary as the founder and director of the legal nonprofit Berkshire Center for Justice in Great Barrington, MA. However, for many years, she did not earn a salary, or if she did, it was not enough to support her and her family, forcing her to work odd jobs to make ends meet. Schatz is an inspiring person having a big impact. She’s opened my eyes to whom I should label a practical altruist.
*** *** ***
By Peter Aronson
The Practical Altruism Project
June 17, 2025
=========================
A 55-year-old law student who had a bold idea
I am sitting on a bench in a small courthouse in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, with attorney Eve Schatz, talking about her unusual career. Within a few moments it’s clear that one of her favorite words is hackles.
As in, “It bothers me, it gets my justice hackles up …”
Eve Schatz’s “justice hackles” often go up.
Her hackles went up when she represented an 86-year-old disabled woman who was tricked into signing a car loan agreement requiring a $700-a-month payment, when her annual income was only $12,000 a year.
Her hackles went up when she represented a young gay tenant, a low-income college student, who couldn’t get his security deposit back from his landlord despite no evidence the tenant had caused any damage in the apartment.
“It bothers me - it gets my justice hackles up - when an underrepresented person is being taken advantage of,” said Schatz in her soft, easy voice, that belies her no-nonsense approach to defending the disenfranchised.
The young tenant she represented that day in Pittsfield housing court was owed $4,225.58 from the landlord. After a one-year ordeal in the court system that included failed mediation, a successful trial verdict, but failure by the landlord to pay, the magistrate on this day approved the agreed upon payment plan.
“If he pays, that’s the end of it,” Schatz said. “If he doesn’t pay, we come right back to court.”
To say that Schatz’s path to the courthouse was unusual, or easy, is an understatement.
For starters, she graduated law school when she was 55 - about 25 to 30 years older than most law school graduates. And while in her first year of law school, while most students are studying the basics - constitutional law, contracts and evidence - and trying to find a summer job, Schatz was planning to start a comprehensive legal clinic that would end up becoming her life’s work.
“I realized that legal, social and community issues were tightly woven,” Schatz said, “and I believed that addressing all three together would produce better client outcomes.”
She did that, starting a pilot project while still in law school that would become the Berkshire Center for Justice.
Now 19 years later, the clinic represents approximately 250 clients a year in Berkshire County, in Western Massachusetts, in civil matters (not criminal cases). Cumulatively, she and her staff of volunteers and one paid employee have helped thousands over the years.
“It’s clearly not a job for her,” said Shirley Edgerton, the chairperson of the Race Relations Committee of the Berkshire County Chapter of the NAACP. “She’s motivated to help people. She’s compassionate, patient, really wanting to address inequities.”
Building a team
While Schatz is the name behind the Berkshire Center for Justice, she says the representation of several thousand clients over the years could not have been accomplished without her one paid employee (an administrative assistant), and a large crew of highly-skilled and motivated volunteers. For starters, BCJ relies on local attorneys and two accountants and two mediators who do pro bono or reduced-fee professional work based on a sliding scale. A dedicated team of primary volunteers include a New Jersey attorney, Jonathan James, who was the general counsel for a $1 billion company; a former high school tech teacher, Scott Steibel, who assists with IT issues; a registered nurse, Charlotte L. Rodgers, who has decades of nursing, assessment and intervention experience and provides nurse case management work; and a volunteer grants writer, Angela Lomanto, who has approximately 40 years of experience in the field.
“When I learned about [Eve’s] mission, I decided to volunteer to help because Eve was doing such great work in our community and helping so many people and families,” Lomanto said.
Nurse Rodgers says her BCJ cases often involve clients trying to cope with basic human needs and conditions.
“An example would be a client with a healthcare condition that is impacting their ability to care for themselves, advocate for themselves or take care of necessary paperwork - such as a housing application,” Rodgers said, adding that many of the BCJ clients “have been impacted by a trauma history, chronic illness or disability.”
However, as with most successful small nonprofits, the engine driving the organization is the founder and director. After all, that’s the person who had the idea to begin with, so Schatz, like other nonprofit leaders I have interviewed, are extremely self-motivated to succeed.
Schatz’s path to BCJ is anything close to a straight line. It’s a curved line, but with a beginning that provides a hint of what was to come.
Schatz’s inspirations
Schatz had two early inspirations: Her divorced mother, who overcame challenges in the 1960s to enter the work world so she could put food on the table and pay the mortgage while raising Eve and her sister in West Hartford, Connecticut. And her bubba, her grandmother on her father’s side, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who almost died on her way to America, ended up being among the first women to graduate from Smith College, taught school, and, in her free time, worked as a volunteer teaching Russian immigrants English.
“She was very generous with the community and had a real sense of giving back,” Schatz said.
From early on, Schatz shunned the mainstream. At UMass Amherst in the 1970s, she was an independent studies major, with a concentration in psychology, allowing her to explore a wide universe of academic subjects, including psychology, anthropology, physics and dance. Her work for decades was relatively low pay and included running an outreach center for teens near Boston, co-founding a music co-op in Cambridge, selling clothing and meditation pillows she made, and selling antiques at flea markets.
A job she held from 2003-2005 has a direct connection to the work she now does. As a transition coordinator at Housatonic Valley Regional High School in the Berkshires, she helped students with disabilities form plans for after graduation.
“I had a student who had an elderly father who was dying,” Schatz said, “but he didn’t have his paperwork in order.” This meant there was no will or trust in place to transfer the property to a minor child who had disabilities, in a way that would protect the assets and help the child.
Schatz connected the student’s father with an attorney, who was able to create a proper estate plan. The bell had been rung.
“My life’s work up to that point involved compassion and service and common sense,” she said. “But now I came upon a creative approach to solving problems and realized that legal, social and community issues were tightly woven. Lawyers and social workers tend to separate them into their own niche. But I wanted to bring them together under one roof.”
She also came to understand what justice stood for from her own personal experiences.
In the 1990s, well before going to law school, Schatz said she was cheated out of a medical insurance claim, so she took the insurer to small claims court and won.
“They were trying to bully me,” she said.
She cited other examples: a car insurance company that refused to pay her claim until she filed a complaint with the insurance commissioner. Her seven-year-long effort to get a patient bill of rights passed in the Florida State Legislature, when she lived in Florida part-time for a period in the 1980s and 1990s, and another seven-year effort, organizing the Great Barrington Neighborhood Group to force toxic waste cleanup.
“I went to hearings with my baby clinging to my skirt,” she said.
Life’s realities hit home
By the early 2000s, Schatz had a young daughter, and she realized her career, where she divided her time between Florida and New England, was no longer practical because it could not be coordinated with a child’s school calendar. She applied and was accepted into law school. In her first year at Western New England University School of Law, in Springfield, MA, she had her epiphany, aided by the memory of the school job in Housatonic.
“I observed that there were lots of hard working good people who couldn’t afford to pay full legal fees in order to hire a lawyer that they deserved,” she said, reflecting on her work at Housatonic Valley High School.
Schatz submitted an application to her law school for a grant to start a legal clinic. The application was rejected.
“So I had to reckon with myself,” she said. “Did I create the organization to get a grant, or do I think this idea had merit on its own to pursue whether or not I received the grant?”
She developed a pilot program and went forward, working with law school classmates at a space donated to them in Great Barrington, not practicing law (they weren’t lawyers yet), but instead running an intake clinic, interviewing clients and finding local pro bono lawyers and social services agencies who could help the clients with the issues presented. A few dozen people needing help showed up that first day, October 1, 2006. A local grocery store donated healthy snacks.
“I realized that people coming into a free legal clinic would need to bring their children with them,” Schatz said, “so I wanted to make sure proper nutrition was on hand.” Soon realizing the clinic served a real need, she ran the operation throughout law school.
“We had a unique program that nobody else was doing or offering,” she said.
Following through in difficult times
After she graduated law school in 2009 and passed the bar exam, she formalized the nonprofit paperwork for the Berkshire Center for Justice, creating one of the few nonprofit legal organizations countywide offering pro bono and sliding scale representation in civil cases. But these were hard times for Schatz, raising a young daughter during a recession and trying to get the legal experience needed to run a legal clinic. Seeking a job to gain experience and income, she mailed out 100 resumes, got one interview and no job. The legal clinic had so little funds that she received no salary for years, then just a little salary for a few more years, forcing Schatz to accept government fuel subsidies and to rent out a room in her home, paint houses (the interiors), do gardening work and clean houses - whatever it took to pay the bills. Schatz said she made the best of a difficult situation, but at times she said it was “humiliating and tortuous.” But there was a silver lining.
“It put me in the shoes of our clients,” Schatz said. “I could relate to the same challenges my clients faced.”
She found mentors who assisted her on paid legal work. She learned and BCJ grew and began to flourish.
“Most law students go to work for someone else to learn the ropes,” said attorney Gail Garrett, who has known Schatz since the start of her legal career. “Eve didn’t need to do that, because she put in place a good support system for herself - her organization, funding and a wide variety of connections.”
Edgerton, with the local NAACP, said she has been working on cases with Schatz for about five years.
“She’s a lone wolf out there giving of herself in terms of legal knowledge and expertise,” she said.
One example she gave was how Schatz brought a case to the NAACP: A young man was trying to resolve legal problems stemming from numerous driving infractions and needed money to pay off his fines. Schatz helped with the legal issues, the NAACP helped pay his fines, to help this man get his life back together, get a job and housing. He moved to Vermont.
“Eve was still trying to help him resolve his issues and create a better life for himself,” Edgerton said. “She doesn’t stop. Whatever the need is to make life better for an individual, she’s there to help.”
BCJ offers free weekly lunchtime legal clinics in Great Barrington. Among the many clients BCJ represents, they include tenants who are being taken advantage of or harassed by landlords or other tenants; consumers who are victims of fraud; and individuals facing divorce who need to protect their assets.
BCJ’s recent clients have included a tenant who was the victim of a racist assault by another tenant; a 71-year-old man facing eviction and likely homelessness; a woman who avoided eviction by getting the substance abuse help she needed; and a man who was allegedly raped by another man. Schatz seems to take all the cases personally, but this last matter was an eye opener.
“I became very aware of the myths surrounding male rape,” Schatz said, “the lack of services to victims, the fact that a lot of male rape victims are reluctant to come forward because while the women’s movement did an excellent job in supporting women … there hasn’t been a parallel effort on behalf of men.”
So Schatz worked with volunteer grants writer Lomanto to obtain funding for the establishment of a resource list for male rape survivors who needed assistance.
BCJ represents a fair number of senior citizens, in a county where a significant percent of the population is elderly and poor or low-income, often just living on Social Security.
Schatz “knows how to stabilize a situation. Our goal is so that our seniors can be as independent as possible and that’s what she accomplishes in the cases she handles,” said Kathleen Phillips, a supervisor at Elder Services of Berkshire County, which provides BCJ with grant money to represent low-income seniors in the county.
In 2021 Schatz was given the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Access to Justice Award, given annually to an attorney who has dedicated their career to advancing access to the legal system.
Of her work Schatz says, “It’s incredibly gratifying to be a voice for the underrepresented. It’s truly, truly wonderful and gratifying.”
If you meet Eve Schatz, you’ll know she means it. And she’ll emphasize that the BCJ work could not get done without her one paid employee and her wonderful volunteers who help BCJ represent the clients who walk through the door.
*** *** ***
If you want to learn more about the Berkshire Center for Justice, please visit their website at https://berkshirecenterforjustice.org/.