The Justice & Diversity Center is delighted to report that Luis Beltran, one of the Bay Area Minority Law Student Scholarship recipients has received the Bergstrom Child Welfare Law Summer Fellowship.

This fellowship is committed to inspiring the best and brightest law students to pursue careers in child welfare law. The Bergstrom Child Welfare Law Fellowship allows students to gain experience and insight into the field and provide much needed services to various child welfare offices specializing in representing children, parents, and social service agencies.

Beltran will attend a three-day training session at Michigan Law School in May and spend at least ten weeks at a child welfare law internship.

Beltran is a 1L at University of California Hastings College of the Law. He applied to for the fellowship because of his personal and professional experiences with the child welfare system. He understands that youth involved in the child welfare system, who are homeless, runaways and foster youth are often presented with a number of risk factors that often make it difficult for them to transition to productive adulthood.

Beltran believes that in order to assist these youth, strong, passionate, and committed legal advocates are needed to link them with the resources that will address the barriers encountered in their lives. As a Bergstrom Fellow, Beltran stated, “I plan to gain more experience so that I may provide the leadership needed to aid this vital segment of the population, which is our future.”

For more information about the Bay Area Minority Law Student Scholarship program, visit www.sfbar.org/scholarships.