PRESS RELEASE: Tracy Goodman of Children’s Law Center to Receive 2023 Scoutt Prize

[District of Columbia, June 2021, 2023] – The District of Columbia Bar Foundation has selected Tracy Goodman as the 2023 Jerrold Scoutt Prize awardee. Ms. Goodman is a director at Children’s Law Center, where she leads their Healthy Together medical-legal partnership. The Scoutt Prize is awarded annually to an attorney who has worked for a significant portion of their career at a nonprofit organization providing devoted, skillful, and compassionate legal work on behalf of underserved residents of the District of Columbia. Ms. Goodman joined Children’s Law Center in 2002 as a staff attorney, where she built Healthy Together with Children’s National Hospital, only the third of its kind in the nation at the time. Through the partnership, Children’s Law Center provides legal services to help families overcome non-medical barriers to health and wellbeing. To this day, it has served tens of thousands of children and families in DC. During her 21 years with Children’s Law Center, Ms. Goodman prioritized expanding services to clinics in Wards 7 and 8 and building new partnerships with Mary’s Center and Unity Healthcare to provide more support to DC’s immigrant communities. Today, Ms. Goodman oversees a team of 16 attorneys, three investigators, and a family outreach worker. Her lawyers work with clinics both onsite and virtually where pediatricians refer patients to lawyers on Ms. Goodman’s team. The team works to resolve health issues like childhood asthma – the most common chronic disease in children – by using the law to fix poor housing conditions that are all too common in the District. Her team also provides special education legal support for students with disabilities or learning needs, health care issues and public benefits, in particularly to support children with disabilities. Seth Rosenthal, Chair of the Scoutt Prize Selection Committee, reflects on Ms. Goodman’s commitment and invaluable contributions to DC’s civil legal landscape: “For nearly three decades, Tracy has been a champion for those in need, providing direct representation to hundreds of District children and mentoring younger attorneys eager to make a similar impact. Having built Healthy Together from the ground up into a flagship medical-legal partnership, Tracy is also a pioneer. Over the span of more than 20 years, the number of District children and families whose housing conditions, health and education the program has improved is remarkable. It was the Committee’s honor to select Tracy as this year’s Scoutt Prize recipient.” Before joining Children’s Law Center, Ms. Goodman was a legal consultant and advocate for the American Center for International Labor Solidarity in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Following several student intern and assistant positions, she began her legal career as a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Bureau, Inc. in Hughesville, Maryland. She has a BA from The American University’s School of Public Affairs and a JD from Georgetown University Law Center. The Jerrold Scoutt Prize was endowed by the Washington, DC firm of Zuckert, Scoutt & Rasenberger and is named in honor of Jerrold Scoutt, Jr., a founding partner of the firm, in recognition of Mr. Scoutt’s and the firm’s long-term support of legal services. In 2019, Zuckert, Scoutt & Rasenberger merged with Kaplan, Massamillo & Andrews and is now KMA Zuckert LLC. The DC Bar Foundation will present the 2023 Jerrold Scoutt Prize to Ms. Goodman during its Fall Reception on November 8, 2023.

About the DC Bar Foundation: We are committed to transforming DC’s legal aid network so that all District residents have a fair and equal legal experience. Through our network approach, we actively work to bring together all invested stakeholders to identify and address the unmet civil legal needs of underserved DC residents, create solutions with a critical eye for racial justice and equity, and demonstrate meaningful impact.

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