Ever since elementary school, when he first helped organize lunches for the hungry in Los Angeles, Brandon Weiss '08 has been drawn to the plight of the homeless. At Stanford, he joined a night outreach program that brought food and supplies to that population in San Francisco, and he edited Street Forum, a newspaper on homelessness and poverty. “I believe we’re all responsible for the conditions of our neighbors,” he says.

He chose HLS hoping to become an advocate for the homeless and soon broadened his focus to affordable housing policy. “I realized there’s a much larger constituency teetering on the edge of homelessness,” he says. He enrolled in a joint-degree program at the Kennedy School—where he has taken classes from experts at the top levels at the Federal Housing Administration and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HLS’s public interest program and the resources it dedicates to public service work, he says, far exceeded his expectations. He was a fellow at Greater Boston Legal Services, an advocate on a tenant advocacy project, an intern at the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty and a summer associate in a firm’s affordable housing and real estate practice groups.

For the next two years, he will be working on a Skadden Fellowship with a community development group helping tenants and owners preserve affordable housing in Los Angeles, where a number of properties are being converted to market-rate units as federal funding contracts supplementing rents for low-income tenants expire. After his fellowship, he hopes to continue to work with nonprofits or for the government on issues related to community development, to help bring resources to areas that haven’t traditionally had them.

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