Buesing wins Simon Pro Bono Service Award.

'Pick up the phone and open that door'

The daughter of a career Army man and aerospace engineer, Karen Meyer Buesing graduated from a Cocoa Beach high school filled with engineers' kids.

"I was utterly unfamiliar with poverty," she said. "It simply didn't exist in our little 8-mile-long, two-block-wide town."

But seven years ago, the shareholder at Akerman LLP in Tampa got an up-close and personal look at poverty. She and her husband, Bob, a partner at Trenam Kemker, embarked on an "extraordinary homeless youth adventure" when they agreed to take in a 14-year-old girl who had been in and out of foster homes for many years.

"We began a journey that forever changed our lives," 60-year-old Buesing told those gathered at the packed Florida Supreme Courtroom on January 30 to honor her as this year's recipient of the Tobias Simon Pro Bono Service Award, the state's highest honor to recognize extraordinary contributions in making legal services available to persons who otherwise cannot afford them.

"In the seven years since we first took her in--yes, she stayed for seven years--we have taken in five other youths who lacked a stable home or were outright homeless," Buesing said, adding one was 15, the others were 18 or older, and they were not part of the foster care system.

"There are no dollars attached to homeless youth," Buesing explained. "They are not in the foster care system, and therefore there are no services. Most of these kids are lacking in formal education and simple life skills. Some have made the kind of bad choices you make when no one shows you how to make the good ones.

"These kids, like most people who are poor and uneducated, have no voice. And even when ... they try to speak, no one listens."

Simply picking up the phone and saying four magic words--"Hello, I'm an attorney"--can "open doors that are closed to the poor, the uneducated, and the disenfranchised." Buesing demonstrated her polite, yet pointed, style:

* "Hello, I'm an attorney, and I'm trying to help a young lady who's trying to get enrolled in the local county health program, and she keeps getting a letter saying she's ineligible, when I'm sure she is. Let's talk."

* "Hello, I'm an attorney, and I am working with a homeless youth who works part-time for minimum wage and reads at the third-grade level and just showed me a contract you had him sign where he agreed to pay $28,000 for a $7,000 car at 28 percent interest. Shall we talk?"

* "Hello, I'm an attorney, and I...