The City of East Palo Alto lies a few miles east of the Stanford campus, but this community of 29,000, on the other side of Highway 101, is a world apart. Despite its palm trees and sunny skies, it is a 2.5-square-mile pocket of poverty amid the affluence of Silicon Valley. 

“What bothers me is how hidden it is from its neighbors,” remarks Jenna Klatell ’04. “I find myself continually pointing it out to people who don’t even know it’s there.” 

To improve awareness of this neighboring city, Stanford law students on April 26 held the School’s annual Building Community Day. On that Saturday morning, about 75 students made the trek to East Palo Alto and joined with residents to clear the new site for a local nonprofit, the Ecumenical Hunger Program; to build flower boxes and paint hopscotch courts at an elementary school; and to create a memorial to a 13-year-old girl who died in a fire on Christmas Eve. 

Klatell helped organize the group that worked on the memorial garden for Lucy Sanft, an eighth grader at the 49ers Academy, a middle school for troubled youth. Sanft’s classmates had been grieving her death, says Klatell, who volunteers at the school, and they had decided on their own to make a tribute to her memory. 

So many volunteers showed up at the school that day there weren’t enough shovels. Some of the middle school students began to dig with their hands. By mid-afternoon, the students’ parents and other neighborhood adults were admiring the completed garden. 

The projects SLS students tackled in April had nothing to do with law school studies, admits David Kovick ’04, an organizer of the workday, but they were a reminder of the world beyond Stanford. “Just because we’re studying the law, we don’t only and always have to be about the law,” he says.