After decades pursuing justice for people in society’s margins as founder of the HIV/AIDS Legal Project in Indianapolis and director of Louisville Legal Aid, Jeff Been ’81 is returning to his hometown and the rural Indiana rhythms that shaped him.
A MIDDLE-AGED MAN wearing an ill-fitting coat and grim expression steps out of the elevator and into the law office lobby at 416 Muhammad Ali Blvd. He hesitates, fixing his gaze on the sign on the wall: Louisville Legal Aid Society—Pursuing Justice, Restoring Hope.
Receptionist Sharon Rufus smiles and steps around her desk to welcome the stranger. Her voice fills the room with hospitality.
“Good afternoon, sir. How can we help you?”
The man has been here before to apply for services, he says. He has returned to talk to a lawyer.
“I’m so glad you came back,” the receptionist says as she walks the man, now smiling, toward the wood-framed glassed-in conference room, part of the open-concept design trendy in today’s law firms.
The professional setting and welcome are no accident.
“Our offices in the Molee Building were dismal and gloomy,” says Jeff Been ’81, who joined the 95-year-old organization in 1992 and became its executive director in 2005. “Clients who had been battered or abused would walk into that oppressive space, and it didn’t look like they were going to get professional legal help.
“One of the smartest things we did was ask ourselves, ‘How can we create a more professional space that welcomes our clients and inspires confidence?’”
So in 2006 Been moved the group to the old Walnut Street Theater across the street. Built for vaudeville acts, it began showing newsreels in the 1940s and was renamed the Scoop Building. Once renovated, the space was a perfect fit for Been’s vision.
“What we have now is what I would consider a medium-sized law office. It has conference rooms. It’s bright and cheery. It lets our clients know they’re in a professional space,” says Been. “It takes a certain level of courage for a person to ask for help. This space gives them the respect they deserve.”
In those offices and in clinics throughout the Louisville area, LASL served 4,420 people in 2014 alone. Been’s tenure as director doubled the number of clients served annually and established more than 15 collaborative partnerships to help clients on economic, housing, or family law issues. The group received more than $1.2 million in technology grants to expand access to legal services for low-income clients.
But the true impact of LASL’s work isn’t in numbers, but in transformed lives.
Brenda Hall was facing a wrongful eviction.
“I was heartbroken, I was a nervous wreck,” she recalls in a documentary for the organization. “It touched my heart that someone cared that much about me and my kids.”
“Oftentimes the legal issue they’re confronting is, for a lawyer, not that complex,” Been explains. “But in their lives it’s a tremendous burden, and they don’t know how to get out of that.”
For Verette Hyder, a victim of identity theft who turned to LASL, the experience was liberating.
“My attorney freed me from being oppressed. It’s a time in your life when you feel like nobody. But by taking my case and going to court, he let me be somebody again.”
Been deflects praise to the generosity of the people of Louisville who “understand thereason we have safety net organizations, the reason we are here for our neighbors,” and to the 39 men and women at LASL.
“We have an incredibly talented staff, and they know that when you speak from the heart, you can connect with any person. That’s what forges the bond of trust.
“We’ve built a community of trust here.”
And at the end of 2015, at age 57, Been left it all behind to retire to rural Delphi, IN.
BEEN GAZES at the Wabash River from the steps of the 166-year-old Italianate-Greek Revival farmhouse he and longtime partner Eric Graninger bought earlier this year.
“I would ride by this farm every day on the school bus and wonder about it,” Been recalls. It was the Munson family farm back then. As he walks the fields on this autumn afternoon as the leaves are just beginning to turn, Been is retracing the steps of his youth.
“The Munsons had sweet corn up here, and I can remember riding in the wagon, Charlie Munson driving the tractor.”
In the flats where Been has discovered asparagus plants, the Munsons had a large garden. He points to the flattened grass where the deer have lain down, remembers trying to make pies out of mulberries.
“Growing up as a farm boy, raising animals, nurturing the soil, so much was imprinted on me.”
The Been farm is just down the road. Been’s father, Herbert, inherited it at 18 when his father died. After serving in World War II, he met Mildred Allen at the Cass County Library where she worked, and the two went together to a dance at the Izaak Walton League. A city girl from Logansport, Mildred took quickly to the rural life and came to love gardening, raising animals, and everything about the outdoors.
The family’s life together planted the seed of Been’s ethical lodestar.
“My father was a carpenter by trade, and he took jobs out to make money while we helped maintain the farm. Mother was there hauling corn and baling hay; we would feed livestock and do our chores. We could play, but you worked first.
“It was a community—you could go up and down the road and find the same thing. There were tasks to be done, and others were depending on you.”
Been’s introduction to Wabash came via his cousins, Courtney and David Justice. As a six-year-old boy he attended Courtney’s Commencement, and when he was in high school, Courtney joined Been’s English teacher and counselors recommending Wabash. Courtney was also his first role model as a lawyer.
“Courtney was really there for the small guy, the underdog. He showed me what good you could do with a law degree.”
An English major at Wabash, Been echoes his mentor Professor John Fischer’s characterization of the College.
“He recently spoke of Wabash as ‘intimate,’ and it was that for me. Whether it was sharing late-night chats with fraternity brothers, or opening-night jitters in the green room before a play, or sitting in Con-Law class with Professor Ed McLean, you could make mistakes and live another day. You knew people cared and supported you.”
Fischer was chief among those people for Been.
“John would see a student on campus and say, ‘You need to come to dinner at my house.’ He certainly did that for this farm boy from, as he would say, ‘Pignipple, Indiana.’
“John’s invitation to a meal was really an invitation to share and relish life. And he has a special gift: He can see into a soul and see a potential and nourish and encourage that. He did that for me and for so many Wabash students.”
BEEN HAS NEVER been one to plan his life, much less his vocation.
“I don’t know that I found the law as much as it found me,” he says. “The law and working in the legal arena became a way to discover new communities, appreciate different experiences.”
Working in Chicago as a law clerk for James Parsons—the first African-American federal district court judge—taught him “how important it is that our courts be open to all people, regardless of economic circumstance.”
In his second year at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Been worked at a clinic for Indiana Legal Services, representing a family whose child was being taken away from them.
“The action brought against them claimed the child was being deprived of nutrition, but the parents were putting on the table the best food they could. I thought, Man, I’m going to screw this up. But we won, and that was my first experience of understanding what good I could do with a law degree.”
From 1984 to 1987 Been taught legal writing at the IU School of Law, and in 1991 he founded the HIV/AIDS Legal Project. When he and Eric moved to Louisville he took on similar work for LASL.
“I got into AIDS work because I saw a need and nobody was pitching in,” Been says. “It wasn’t organized, and I could see the need within the circle of friends I had. You just answer the call.”
Been and his team had to fight to establish adoption rights, custody, and patients rights. When they began, there was only one nursing home in Kentucky that would accept patients with HIV. He traveled the state talking to nursing home administrators.
“I would tell them that refusing these people wasn’t only against the law, but it was wrong. These patients were people facing the last days of their lives.”
Fighting for one patient, in particular, taught him that “there’s a point in a person’s life, whether you’re poor, rich, pleasant, unpleasant, you’re entitled to the same level of care and compassion as everyone else.”
Memories of those he worked with during some of the most trying days of the HIV/AIDs epidemic move him still.
“When I announced my retirement, I got a letter from a woman whose brother I had represented,” Been says, tearing up. “He had died of AIDS, but she wanted to thank me. She said, ‘You were just great.’ Somehow I had helped in ways I didn’t realize at the time.
“I feel very privileged to have done the work I have done. I’m proud that work is going to continue and that I’ve been able to leave the organization so that it has a stable and secure future.
“But I’ve talked with a number of senior attorneys in their 60s who say, ‘You know, about 10 years ago I was about ready to chuck it all, but didn’t.’ They wonder what they might have done instead. That was a learning moment for me: Why wait until I’m 65 or 70 to see what’s next? Why not just do it now and see where it leads?”
Been recently rediscovered the personal statement he wrote more than 30 years ago for his admittance to law school.
“I talked about how I grew up on a farm, how I wanted to go out and explore other communities, and how I might come back some day.”
That personal statement might have some insight.
“For a decade I was known as the AIDS lawyer. Most recently I’ve been director of legal aid. My most recent visit to Delphi I was chatting with some folks around the courthouse square and trying to tell them who I was. They said, ‘Oh, you’re Herbert and Mildred’s boy.’ That’s my new title. New, but it’s old, and it’s not so bad. I’m looking forward to it.”
WE’RE HAVING LUNCH with Been in his renovated farmhouse when his sister, Paula, knocks at the door. She lives just down the road, as do Been’s father and other sister, Lucinda. Jeff and Paula are talking about their father when I ask her whether she enjoys having her brother around again. She makes a joke and the two of them laugh.
“He was already helping out, even when he didn’t live here,” says the former teacher who has lived most of her life in rural Delphi. “But it’s nice. People don’t do this so much anymore.”
It’s an important time to return. Mildred Been died last March, and Been’s father, now 90,
lives alone. The Delphi countryside is the outdoors his mother loved and where he first learned that “there are tasks to be done, and people are counting on you.”
He’s excited about developments in Delphi, which reopened its renovated opera house this fall, but he’s in no rush to get involved.
“I could do some consulting work, but I’m not going to force myself into anything right now. I’m looking forward to some unstructured days, to learning some new rhythms.
“I know the rhythms of what I do now well: when we do our final audit, our special fundraiser, and the cycles of grants. Now I’m discovering the old rhythms again—when the bees start swarming, when the asparagus sprouts.
“I feel like I lost that rhythm, and it might take a year of watching the river and the bluejays to get it back.”
A LOUISVILLE LEGACY
As Jeff Been ’81 ends his nearly three-decade tenure with the Legal Aid Society of Louisville (LASL), we asked four of his most recent Wabash interns to describe him:
JACOB GERMAN ’11
Barnes & Thornburg, Indianapolis
Jeff’s lasting impact on me really came from his desire to help anyone, whatever the time or circumstances. He had confidence in the Wabash men to come and work on complicated projects that made actual impacts on the lives of poor people in Louisville. He continues to check in and offer advice as I launch my own legal career.
JACOB BURNETT ’15
Project Manager, Oxford Pro Bono Publico, UK
That summer at LASL unleashed and channeled a floodgate of passion in my life. Jeff is able to articulate the need to care for all people of a community, and he goes out of his way to truly help anyone who needs it. I wouldn’t be where I am today without his generosity and mentoring.
SETON GODDARD ’15
Cigna Global Health, Wilmington, DE
On my second day working at LASL, Development Director Julia Leist and I attended a meeting for nonprofit fund-raisers. I sat down next to a woman from a local organization and told her where I was working. She looked at me with a huge smile and said, “So, you must get to work with Jeff Been? If I could be half the leader that Jeff is, I would be one hell of an executive director. You’ll have a hard time finding someone who has as much respect in Louisville as Jeff Been has.”
NICHOLAS MARAMAN ’10
Legal Aid Society of Louisville
Jeff hired me as both a summer intern and an attorney after law school. He has been a role model for me. He is polished. He is poised. He is kind and generously shares credit and offers praise. And it all seems effortless. Jeff Been is Legal Aid, and it is hard to imagine the Legal Aid Society without him leading us.