Community Economic Development 2022 Highlights

Professor Patience Crowder (lower left), director of Denver Law's Community and Economic Development Clinic, met with new clinic students at TeaLee’s Tea House and Bookstore during Fall 2022 orientation.

This year the Community Economic Development Clinic (CEDC) welcomed 8 new students eager to learn about transactional public interest lawyering. Orientation included a tour of Five Points, an historically African American neighborhood in downtown Denver, with discussions about the ethics surrounding redevelopment during a visit to TeaLee’s Tea House and Bookstore. Orientation also included a tour of one of the clinic’s clients, the ZONE Marketplace, a retail business incubator where students heard directly from small business owners about their motivations for and fears about starting a new business.

The CEDC is a year-long clinic and this year students will work with clients to, among other projects, create transactional mechanisms to build the capacity and operations of both (i) a nonprofit corporation focused on economic development in one of Colorado’s oldest rural Hispanic and indigenous communities and (ii) a nonprofit corporation focused on increasing opportunities for those experiencing homelessness to shelter in place with their pets. Clinic students will also teach “legal night” classes for retail small business owners, develop an equity assessment tool to help an environmental organization measure its program delivery and also develop nontraditional governance structures that reflect the priorities of indigenous communities.

CEDC Faculty Highlights

Professor Patience Crowder

• Panelist, Leading While Black in White Spaces, Clinicians of Color Annual Meeting and Workshop, AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education (May 13, 2022).
• Panelist, Live-Client Clinics: Reexamining How Clinics Connect our Work to Real Life Events Outside the Classroom, AALS Clinical Directors’ Conference (June 10, 2021).
• Panelist, Building Our Students’ Foundation in Intersectionality, AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education (April 28, 2021).
• Panelists, Fortifying Experiential Education and Ourselves Through Leadership in the Clinical Community, AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education (April 28, 2021).