It is with great sadness that we let you know that our beloved colleague, Shari Zimble, died on Thursday, October 23, after a long battle with cancer. Shari was a long-time legal aid attorney – starting out in 1988 as a staff attorney at Legal Assistance of Central MA; over the years, she also worked at Cambridge & Somerville Legal Services, the Harvard Law School clinical program, and Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. In 2001, Shari joined the training team at MLRI that was to become Center for Legal Aid Education. As one of CLAE's co-founders and as CLAE's Director of Curriculum & Training Development, Shari joyfully took on the task of helping build a national organization that would ensure that legal aid advocates across the country had ready access to the continuing education, training and leadership development necessary for them to deliver on the promise of equal justice.
A natural educator, Shari brought a rare mix of passion, legal expertise, creativity and innovation to her work at CLAE. She designed and delivered scores of training programs for legal aid staff in New England and nationally; she was a leader in designing CLAE's online campus and developing our web-based training programs. Her most recent, and perhaps best loved project, was the year-long New England Leadership Institute, a nationally recognized model for building strong, diverse equal justice leadership. The Institute’s first class of twenty-four fellows and mentors uniformly described her as the Institute’s “heart and soul.”
Shari once wrote that “the responsibility we have as leaders is not just to inspire others; it also includes a willingness to be inspired by today’s new and emerging leaders.” In so many ways, Shari epitomized this aspect of leadership. She was truly inspired by the younger advocates she taught through the Leadership Institute and all of her other courses.
Shari was fervently committed to the legal aid community and
to the clients and communities we serve. And as much as she contributed to the legal aid community (which is vast), she was equally sustained by the community – both in terms of the opportunities to contribute her many talents to the cause of equal justice but also by so many of you – her legal aid friends and colleagues. Even in the final months of illness, Shari continued to contribute her vision and endless talents to her legal aid work. She completed her final project, an innovative training video on “Working with Clients with Limited English Proficiency,” in late July 2008.
