Shea Backes

Shea has been working with people living on the street since 2016 and decided to pursue a law degree to better advocate for this community. She graduated from Occidental College in 2018 with degrees in Sociology and French Studies and began working full time in street outreach and case management. She was a COVID-19 Response Team Program Manager for the LA County Department of Health Services where she designed and led COVID vaccine efforts for people living on the street, creating the first clinics of their kind in the United States as well as creating harm reduction plans for quarantine and isolation sites, and developing and facilitating harm reduction trainings for DHS staff. She was later asked to take on the new role of Harm Reduction Strategy Program Manager where she created a countywide harm reduction program from scratch. She is involved in unhoused mutual aid work, including the newspaper Street Views, a publication by and for the unhoused community which is currently working on its third edition. She was inspired to go to law school based on the injustice she saw on the street and intends to use her degree to do unhoused rights advocacy, including civil impact litigation to change oppressive anti-camping laws. At Loyola, she is the president of the Homeless Rights Law Society and a National Lawyers Guild board member. She is also on Loyola Law Review and the Loyola Journal of Public Interest.