A Voice for the Voiceless: Jacquelynne J. Bowman, 2024 BBA Voice of Change

What motivates a person to enact change within a system? For Jacquelynne J. Bowman, Executive Director of Greater Boston Legal Services (GBLS), it was tragedy; when she was 13 years old, her father—on his way home from work in the Englewood neighborhood of the family’s hometown of Chicago—was shot and killed during a gang-related robbery. But rather than respond with anger and resentment, it was instead an overwhelming sense of empathy that led Bowman down a path that would come to define her life’s work.

“When that happened, I started paying more attention to the juvenile justice system,” Bowman said. “What was going on in the system?”

That question led Bowman to Antioch Law School (which now operates as the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law), chosen in part due to its clinical program that allowed for hands-on experience early in her legal studies.

In her first year of law school, Bowman got involved in providing legal services under the direction of seasoned attorneys. Her first experience was working with a criminal law firm providing legal assistance to juveniles, and her very first case was an arson-murder case involving some very young kids.

“It was clear to me that these kids did not know what they had done or why they were now involved in the criminal justice system,” Bowman recalled. “For me, that was a real education.”

That experience only fueled further questions for Bowman: Who found themselves involved in the juvenile justice system? What determined whether an offender was able to escape that system, or found themselves constantly returning to it? What underlying issues contributed to this pattern, and—perhaps most importantly—what steps can be taken to break that cycle and ultimately prevent it in the first place?

“Some of the kids that I worked with really needed a wide range of support, whether it was education, family issues, mental health. You can’t work with kids without also realizing what’s going on in a family structure, and what I found was I was working primarily with single mothers—often themselves survivors of sexual or domestic violence—so I decided I wanted to do something, and the one way that I could address all of these issues upstream was through legal services.”

That realization led Bowman to GBLS, where she initially started as a senior attorney and then managing attorney of the Family Law Unit.

“Jacqui has always had a soft spot for our work with children,” said Ana Cruz, Chief Development Officer, GBLS. “She has a depth of on-the-ground legal experience that informs her understanding of the work while also assessing and analyzing the big picture of what’s at stake, how we need to approach a situation, and how GBLS can help.”

Bowman left GBLS in 1991 to work at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute as the state support attorney for family and juvenile law matters before returning to GBLS in 1998, first as an Associate Director before becoming Deputy Director and eventually Executive Director, a role she’s held since 2011. Her responsibility in that role, she says, is to make sure that GBLS and its team of attorneys and paralegals are providing high-quality, free legal advice and representation to families and individuals living in poverty to help them assert their rights and secure the most basic necessities of life, including housing, health care, transportation access, safety for battered women and their children, and much more.

“Jacqui has certainly been a voice of change as Executive Director of GBLS,” said Krietta Bowens Jones, Chair of the BBF Grants Committee, who has also worked with Bowman on the Massachusetts Access to Justice Commission. “My former BBF Grants Committee co-chair, David Ferrera, refers to GBLS as a fulcrum organization in the legal services infrastructure of the Greater Boston area, around which most other civil legal aid providers revolve, and much of its unparalleled status is thanks in large part to Jacqui’s leadership and contributions.”

“She’s thoughtful, analytic, tenacious, and compassionate,” added Cruz. “The work of civil legal aid is vitally important to her, and she has dedicated her life to ensuring that members of our community are treated fairly and have opportunities to grow and thrive.”

Anne Trinque, President of the GBLS Board, also believes “voice of change” is an apt description for Bowman, but that it’s her actions that speak far louder than her words.

“Jacqui is a mission-focused, steadfast, but quiet leader,” Trinque said. She credited Bowman with helping GBLS navigate the complexities of the COVID pandemic, a job made even more difficult because many of the clients GBLS serves did not have easy access to technology when in-person assistance became an impossibility. “She isn’t afraid to try things, and to do things differently, but she does it with a measured, thoughtful approach, which allowed us to pivot really beautifully without much disruption in our ability to make an impact for our clients.”

Though the logistical challenges posed by the COVID pandemic are largely behind us, Bowman says the lingering effects—people still struggling to pay rent, health care access, violence in the home—are still being felt. Ensuring low-income residents can meet their basic needs is a job with no end in sight—but for Bowman, the work comes naturally.

“I feel like this is the work that we all should be doing,” Bowman said. “We as lawyers and those working within the legal community are the gatekeepers of the justice system, and that means that we have to make sure that the gates stay open for everybody, regardless of whether they have the money to pay for it or not.”

For Bowman, that work allows her to be a “voice for the voiceless.”

“The people we help often feel like they don’t have a voice; we’re there to be their voice. We’re there to make sure that the people who have the authority, the people who have the money, the people who have power, can hear the most vulnerable.”

For more than 30 years, Bowman has been that voice, and the Boston Bar Foundation is proud to honor her for it.