The Austin American-Statesman featured Haynes and Boone, LLP Counsel Catherine Robb in a story about her volunteer work that she says was inspired by her late grandmother, Lady Bird Johnson.
Here’s an excerpt:
During the final 8 1/2 years of her grandmother’s life, Catherine Robb kept a regular Tuesday night date with Lady Bird Johnson, whom she and the other Johnson grandchildren called Nini.
They watched TV, shared dinner and chatted, then Robb might read aloud, a special treat because Johnson was a lifelong lover of books but suffered from strokes and advanced macular degeneration during her later years.
After the former first lady died on July 11, 2007, Robb, an Austin attorney and avid runner, found herself unexpectedly unmoored on Tuesdays. ... Later, Robb initiated a new Tuesday routine of intimate dinner parties, just close friends and family. That seemed to keep the day consecrated in a sense.
Meanwhile, the longtime congregant at St. David’s Episcopal Church downtown also occasionally volunteered with the group’s Trinity Street religious services on Sundays, aimed at the church’s neighbors without homes.
“I love what we are doing with the Trinity Center,” Robb says of the service group that holds its annual Barbara Jordan Celebration and benefit April 24. “I also knew Diane Holloway (a former American-Statesman reporter) when she was volunteering there, before she ran the volunteer program. I reached out to her and said, ‘I’d like to do it on Tuesdays, women’s day. What can I do that day to give back?’ I wanted to do things that were in keeping with the spirit of my grandmother.”
So for the past year and a half, Robb has devoted Tuesdays to helping the church’s neighbors with the kinds of things that lawyers already do well.
“I help fill out forms, help apply for identification,” Robb says. “I provide information on how to find services and whatever else is needed, while the center helps with payment vouchers. That can mean replacement IDs, driver’s licenses, birth certificates, whatever they need to get a job, get housing, get health care, enroll their kids in school.”
The busy center at Seventh and Trinity streets is only a few blocks’ stroll from her law offices at Sixth Street and Congress Avenue. Robb is sure that her grandmother, who taught the value of philanthropy to her children and grandchildren, would have approved of the latest Tuesday tradition. ...
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