National Pro Bono Week

H/T to Orin Kerr for pointing this out, but this week is national pro bono week.  Being an international law blog, I wanted to invite readers to mention any international or transnational pro bono work they do.

Me?  I serve as the board chair of a nonprofit global media assistance organization, the Media Development Loan Fund.  I’ve served in that capacity for getting towards twelve (fourteen?) years now, as the organization started by making loans and investments in independent media companies in various places around the world.  It’s a remarkable organization, a combination of mission-driven nonprofit and private equity fund.  It has funded newspapers, radios, TV stations, internet projects in difficult environments ranging from the provinces of Russia to Guatemala, Macedonia to Indonesia.  It has absorbed a huge amount of my time over these years – easily an average of a day a week.  On the other hand, having what amounts to an active practice in international transactions and international nonprofit governance has been good for my teaching – I always feel like I bring practical experience, the way an adjunct professor would, to my business and finance classes; our organization did one of the first issuances of a publicly traded swap note by an international nonprofit (that is, not a university, church, or real-estate owning nonprofit) on the Zurich exchange a couple of years ago, for example.  But I am stepping down as board chair at the end of this year; the organization’s board needs to turn over, and anyway I would like to be able to write about the kinds of cutting edge development finance work that the organization has engaged in (I haven’t felt comfortable writing about things like media models in the developing world given my ex oficio position, yet I have a lot I’d like to say academically about development finance, as well as media).    My friends and colleagues at MDLF are the greatest in the world, and I will miss being in close contact with them greatly once I step down.

I also serve as the US chair of the Rift Valley Institute, a nonprofit based out of London and Nairobi that engages in various research and study projects in the Rift Valley, with particular attention to Sudan.  This is not on account of my experience in Africa; I don’t have any.  Rather, the US board needed someone with nonprofit law experience and nonprofit governance knowledge, and the founder is a close personal friend.  But this organization has done very important work, for example, in assembling the Sudan Archives project online.  It runs an annual training school for aid workers, international organization and government workers, and others going into Sudan that is is a big help in dealing with transitional international staff in Sudan.