-
Catherine Kay at her desk in her office at Community Legal Aid in Northampton with items she felt were important to her — a letter from her parents, the Constitution a sheet of music with notes from her teacher, and a photo of her as an eighth grader. “I think the eighth grade Cathy would be proud of what I’ve done with my life in music and in law,” she says. -
Catherine Kay at her desk in her office at Community Legal Aid in Northampton with items she felt were important to her — a letter from her parents, the Constitution a sheet of music with notes from her teacher, and a photo of her as an eighth grader. “I think the eighth grade Cathy would be proud of what I’ve done with my life in music and in law,” she says.
NORTHAMPTON — Some people are led by answers, but Catherine Kay’s life has unfolded around a guiding question: What can I do, with my current passions and capabilities, to support myself and my community?
“It’s always been clear to me that we don’t live our lives just for ourselves, but that we all have gifts and that it’s our purpose in life to use those gifts in the service of others,” Kay said.
The answers brought Kay to legal services nonprofit Community Legal Aid and its predecessor, Western Mass Legal Services, for two separate careers in law practice and management — in the beginning and at the end of her career. In between, she shelved her legal pursuits to follow her passions as a musician, music director and choral instructor.
During her 38 years in Northampton, she’s volunteered her time at the First Congregational Church in Amherst, served on the boards of Well On Their Way, Northampton Board of Registrars and Dollars for Scholars. She’s raised three children with husband Rich Cooper, the retired owner of Cooper’s Corner in Florence and State Street Fruit Store in Northampton, and always offered her support of his businesses alongside her own career aspirations.
Now on the verge of retirement, Kay once again finds herself asking a question: What’s next?
Kay worked her final day on Friday for Community Legal Aid, where for the last eight years she has overseen the organization’s Civil Legal Aid for Victims of Crime (CLAVC) program, a statewide initiative that provides supplementary legal services to survivors of crimes. Friday also likely marked her last day in law altogether.
Whatever comes next, Kay says her community work is far from over.
“I realized it was kind of these experiences building on themselves,” Kay said. “I was saying ‘yes’ and embracing new opportunities. I was listening to myself and what’s going on around me and reacting to that. I was learning from every opportunity and responding. I don’t think I’m exceptional, I just think that’s how our lives work.”
As an undergraduate history student at Smith College, Kay spent more time at the piano bench than in the history department. She would accompany several choral and music groups for her work-study program, and felt torn between law and music.
Her path turned a corner when Betty Fredian, Smith’s 1981 commencement speaker, inspired her to return to her home state of Illinois and campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment. This civil engagement, along with her volunteer work at Cook County Legal Assistance Foundation in Chicago, motivated her to apply for law school.
“There are practical ways that I see music and lawyering intersecting,” Kay said. “You have something you want to communicate, and you figure out how you’re going to tell that story, whether it’s in the music or it’s in the legal case. It’s also true that in preparing, you start with what you know and you build off that.”
Building off the foundation of Kay’s legal knowledge and life experience was key to developing Community Legal Aid’s version of the CLAVC.
The program provides legal services for victims of crimes who may require additional expertise after their initial case is completed, but don’t have the money to pay for it.
For instance, a victim of statutory assault may want to issue a restraining order or divorce their partner. CLAVC offers legal advice, limited intervention or representation in court for these additional consequences of a crime.
“You see those ripple effects of that one crime flow out,” Kay said.
However, bringing CLAVC to Community Legal Aid was an uphill battle. Jennifer Dieringer, a managing attorney at Community Legal Aid, said CLAVC was not even fully formed at the state level before Kay began working on the nonprofit’s version. The program brought in new types of cases, like education law, to Community Legal Aid, which the attorneys on staff had little familiarity with. It was up to Kay, Dieringer said, to educate everyone in the organization on what the program was and how it worked.
“It was really trying to figure out how this program that doesn’t really act like any other practice area fits into the (existing) programs,” she continued.
Nearly every aspect of the way that Community Legal Aid conducts business has changed since Kay began at her career in legal aid. She remembers running handwritten notes out to the typist in the hallway and faxing documents between the Northampton and Pittsfield offices.
The nonprofit’s structure has grown and evolved Worcester County and all four western Massachusetts counties, so as scale grows so does staff size. However, she says, the core of the organization remains the same, as well as its mission to provide legal assistance to those without the capital to pay for these services.
“There were passionate, smart, hard working, devoted lawyers, paralegals and administrative support staff in 1987 and there are that same quality of people now,” Kay said.
In between her work in legal aid, Kay returned to two other core values of her life: music and family.
A mother-daughter music class at the Northampton Community Music Center laid the seed for her second music career as a choral instructor. Over the course of 15 years, Kay taught and conducted choral groups at the music center and at Williston Northampton School while raising her three children. She also returned to Smith as the college’s choir accompanist.
“Everything I learned in the legal world really enhanced the work I was able to do with my students,” Kay said. “I was sharing that music with them and letting them see that here I was, a mom and lawyer and also a music teacher.”
It wasn’t until she began volunteering with the Williston Northampton School We the People team that her passion for law reignited. The experience, she said, took her back to her eighth grade constitutional unit, one of her favorite projects in school.
Despite taking a 15-year break from the legal aid field, Kay remained a staple of the western Massachusetts legal aid scene.
“She’s a yes person,” Dieringer said. “She starts from yes, how can we make this happen? How can we do the thing that people want to do, even when it doesn’t seem like there’s capacity or an ability to do it, or it’s something we’ve never done before. That’s been really great in all of the areas.”
Raquel Manzanares, an attorney at Legal Aid who had an office next to Kay for years, often overheard the seasoned attorney exercise extreme patience, kindness and polish with difficult clients in high stress circumstances. Manzanares describes Kay as the office’s “trusted adult” because she and her colleagues stop by Kay’s office whenever they need advise on a legal issue, client interaction, personal problem or even just an outside opinion.
“She’s everything I want to be when I grow up.” Manzanares said. “She does everything with this really deep integrity that’s steeped in Midwestern kindness. She’s sensible, humble, reasonable. I can’t imagine doing this work without her.”
It’s the community of attorneys across the Community Legal Aid offices that kept Kay afloat on her hardest days, she said, and it’s community she will continue to seek out as she closes out this chapter of her life. In retirement, Kay says she’ll spend more time with her family and once again immerse herself in music.
The remaining pieces, however, will continue to fall into place as she seeks answers to the “What’s next?” question.
“I think that young teenager would be amazed and proud of the life that unfolded,” Kay said in a post-interview email. “Even as a teen, I had the same four foundation points as I do now at retirement — family, faith, justice and music. Those core values have held firm all these years and have supported a rewarding, challenging, and always interesting career path that has blended it all together.”
Emilee Klein can be reached at eklein@gazettenet.com.
