“I really wanted to connect myself to the issue that brought me to this country in the first place,” says Louis Lainé ’16, who was a Truman Scholar and a Philip Evans Scholar at Swarthmore. “It involves building a lot of empathy to best understand what people’s needs actually are.”

by Tomas Weber

“THERE’S A LOT OF POWER in just sitting down with someone and listening to their stories,” says Louis Lainé ’16, who works at New York’s Catholic Charities Community Services. Assisting people who have recently arrived in the United States, Lainé spends his days working to help individuals become as self-sufficient as possible. He connects them with channels of support for finding jobs and housing. For Lainé, immigration is personal. As a boy in Haiti, he remembers one of his classmates being kidnapped. The last straw for Lainé’s mother? A shooting outside his elementary school. The violence precipitated the family’s move to New Jersey. With high school graduation on the horizon, Lainé and his parents drove to visit Swarthmore. They got lost, arriving at campus well after nightfall. But ultimately, it was at college that Lainé found his path. He intended to take premedical studies, but Associate Professor of Philosophy Krista Thomason’s classes transformed everything. “She changed my life,” he says, by offering him the tools to immerse himself in moral and political philosophy and constitutional law. A vision of a career in public-interest law came into focus. “At the time, I thought you had to be a specific kind of person to be a scholar, to look or sound a certain way,” says Lainé, who was a a Philip Evans Scholar. “Professor Thomason helped me figure out that I didn’t have to change who I was. All I had to do was be myself and work hard.”