The Hotel Abandon: July 2008

Big-Tex Firms' Pro Bono Hours Rose By Nearly 15 Percent in '07
By Jeanne Graham and Brenda Sapino Jeffreys
Texas Lawyer
July 28, 2008

........

A Future for Children

For more than a decade, Alexis Hefley ran a nonprofit in Dallas providing financial support for orphans in Uganda. But when she decided to leave Uganda Children's Charity Foundation to form a new charity, Hefley was the one who needed some help.She found that assistance at Andrews Kurth, where lawyers volunteered to help Hefley set up her new Dallas-based charity, Empower African Children, and negotiate an underwriting deal with Macy's Inc. for a photo book about orphans in Uganda. Andrews Kurth Dallas partners Scott Kline and Quentin Faust as well as other lawyers at the firm devoted 200 hours in 2007 to pro bono legal work for Empower African Children. The 200 hours represent 4.3 percent of the 4,636 hours Andrews Kurth's Texas lawyers devoted to pro bono work in 2007. Houston-based Andrews Kurth had 402 attorneys firmwide as of Jan. 1, and 341 in Texas.

"They were just amazing," Hefley, founder and chief executive officer of Empower African Children, says about the Andrews Kurth lawyers. She says the firm provided Empower African Children with free legal work valued at $70,000 to $75,000. "They helped me cross a lot of bridges," she says.

Hefley met Kline through a referral in 2006 from her longtime friend Stephen Malouf, a plaintiffs lawyer in Dallas. Kline says he and Malouf are also friends, and he agreed in the fall of 2006 to help Helfey do the paperwork needed to set up her new nonprofit.

But that work expanded in a big way in 2007, as he and Faust helped Hefley negotiate a deal with Macy's to underwrite the creation of "Transcendent Spirit: The Orphans of Uganda," a book by photojournalist Douglas Menuez that would financially benefit Empower African Children. According to a Macy's press release, the book captures "the story of the children in Uganda, the impact of AIDS and how the transforming power of the arts has provided a message of hope."

Hefley, a native of Amarillo, says she first went to Uganda in 1993 at the invitation of Janet Museveni, the first lady of Uganda, who was active in projects to assist orphans there. Hefley says she met Museveni through her volunteer work at a ministry in Washington, D.C. While in Uganda, Hefley started working with Sister Rose Muzinza, who founded the Daughters of Charity orphanages in Uganda.To raise money for the orphanages, Hefley helped organize a cultural dance troupe called Children of Uganda, which gave a few performances in the United States and England in 1994.

In 1995, she returned to Dallas and founded the Ugandan Children's Charities Foundation to raise money to help support the orphanages and a scholarship program to bring some young people to the United States from Uganda for education, she says. The dance troupe, Children of Uganda, which expanded over the years to about 22 performers, was a major fundraiser for the charity and is the subject of the book "Transcendent Spirit."

Hefley says she decided in 2006 to form a new charity, after seeing dramatic changes in the lives of some of the youth who have participated in the dance troupe or the scholarship program. She says education gives the youth hope for the future - many plan to return to Uganda after their education and do good - and she says the mission of her new charity is making education possible for more youth in the African nation.She says 2.4 million of the 27 million people in Uganda are orphans; many lost their parents to AIDS or civil war.

Hefley says the Andrews Kurth lawyers helped her negotiate her departure from Uganda Children's Charities Foundation. She brought the program overseeing the dance troupe, now called the Spirit of Uganda, and the scholarship program with her to Empower African Children. But her big plan is to build a secondary school in Uganda, where many orphans and other poor youth cannot afford to pay for secondary school. She notes that only elementary school is free, and in a country where more than half of the population lives on $1 a day, secondary education costs about $300 a year.Hefley says she needs to raise about $4.3 million to build the school, and hopes to have it open in 2010.

The work Kline and Faust did for Hefley and Empower African Children isn't typical pro bono work, such as representing a person in a landlord-tenant dispute or representing a convicted murderer in a death-penalty appeal.

Initially, they helped set up the new nonprofit."She became kind of a pro bono corporate client where we were advising her on [nonprofit] structure, establishing a board of directors, setting a goal for the organization, obtaining tax-exempt status, those types of things," says Kline, who does corporate and intellectual property work.

But he says that after he and Faust met some of the Uganda youth who participated in the dance troupe, and they became inspired by the dancers' "amazing spirit," he and Faust agreed to work on the book project. Faust says most of the negotiations were with Macy's business executives, although an in-house lawyer at Macy's participated in some of the talks.

Faust says he briefly served on the board of Empower African Children in early 2007, because the charity needed a certain number of independent directors to obtain 501(c) charitable status, but all of his pro bono hours relate to work he did as a lawyer.

Macy's underwrote the book to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Passport, a Macy's fundraiser for AIDS projects. Actress and AIDS activist Elizabeth Taylor wrote an introduction to the book, which Hefley says documents the lives of the young children on the tour. Many are orphans who lost their parents to AIDS, she says. Macy's also agreed to be the national sponsor for the 2008 Spirit of Uganda dance tour.

Kline says, "Most of the work last year was on three things: the book, the tour, and then helping Alexis with general and administrative and corporate work as she hired people and worked through finalizing tax issues and things like that."

A Macy's West spokeswoman did not respond to questions about the book project or Macy's sponsorship of the 2008 Spirit of Uganda tour.Pamela Brannon, executive director of Hefley's old charity, now called Children of Uganda and based in Charles Town, W.Va., refers questions to Dallas lawyer Michael McCue. Brannon says McCue was chairman of the board of Uganda Children's Charities Foundation at the time of Hefley's departure. McCue, a partner in Meadows, Collier, Reed, Cousins & Blau, did not return two telephone messages.

Faust says his work for Empower African Children has been the most intellectually stimulating pro bono work he has ever done.

"When you do mergers and acquisitions and securities filings, it was very interesting to work on a project where there's an artistic end," Faust says. "I got to hold the book in my hand. I got to see the kids perform. It makes me feel amazing."

He adds, "This is as sexy as pro bono gets."