Charting a New Path

Irmas Fellow KeAndra Dodds '12 works to protect affordable housing in California

By Maria Iacobo

An interest in how cities and transportation infrastructure are planned brought KeAndra Dodds ’12 to Los Angeles three years ago. Being selected the 2012-13 Irmas Fellow last June keeps her here to pursue her work in this area.

KeAndra Dodds '12 is sworn into the state and federal bar

The Irmas Fellowship is a one-year postgraduate fellowship honoring the late Sydney M. Irmas ’55 and his wife, Audrey. It was created through the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Irmas and USC Gould’s Public Interest Law Foundation (PILF). Each year, the fellowship is awarded to a recent USC Gould graduate starting a career in public interest. It provides an annual salary of $40,000 to work at an agency of the graduate’s choice; employment benefits are provided for by the agency.

Dodds is spending a year at the Western Center on Law and Poverty, where she is working on a self-designed project based on recent California legislation that sets regional targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It’s an effort she has been interested in since attending high school in St. Louis, Mo.

“St. Louis is almost like a smaller scale Los Angeles, because development is spread out and public transportation is scarce and inefficient,” Dodds says. 

Moving to Philadelphia for college and majoring in urban studies, Dodds studied East coast cities with integrated public transportation systems. She initially thought she would earn a master’s degree in city planning but decided policy-based work would be more interesting.

“One of the reasons I wanted to come to Los Angeles is that I always studied it as a bad example of planning in general, but mostly for [it’s lack of public] transportation,” Dodds says. “It’s not sustainable to keep expanding like this.”

With the recent passage of legislation to coordinate planning for land use and transportation – Senate Bill (SB)375 – Dodds says California is finally moving towards trying to find more sustainable methods as it expands.

“As more development comes in, affordable housing tends to be moved  out,” Dodds says. “We need to protect the affordable housing that is initially there and make sure new affordable housing is included in the planning process.”

Despite entering law school with a specific interest in affordable housing and transportation issues, Dodds explored other areas of law in her studies. But, her summer jobs kept bringing her back. After her first year of law school, Dodds interned at the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center, where she worked with a few clients on housing discrimination claims. The following summer she was a law clerk at the Housing Rights Center, a public/private interest law firm that focuses on fair housing through education, advocacy and litigation. The former provided direct client contact; the latter provided more experience with the litigation side of legal services work, including writing briefs.

Dodds’ commitment to a career in public interest and the scope and feasibility of her proposal earned her the fellowship which is awarded by the PILF board each spring. She provides a written report to the Irmas Foundation every few months updating them on her progress.

“USC gave me the opportunity to look at other options in legal careers,” Dodds says.  “It was eye opening to learn that you could do pro bono work in private law firms. I also had the opportunity to learn about real estate finance, real estate transaction and land use controls. It’s so different in California as opposed to other states. Land use controls gave me a great historic perspective about planning from the legal side. In those ways USC was great at expanding my knowledge and prepared me to better do the work I’m doing now.”

Dodds says her work with the Mediation Clinic was her most memorable experience in law school.

“For all intents and purposes we were real lawyers. We were out there on our own dealing with real cases and trying to get a settlement agreement between two parties,” she says. “It may take a few hours and the parties may start far apart [but] somehow you try to get them to a place where they agree that [the settlement] is fair and the judge approves it. You really made a difference and the parties are usually better off.. That was a cool experience.”

Dodds says she would like to be involved in mediation in the future, but for now she is happy with her current work at the center. It’s a path she had been planning for years.