VLA Announces New Disability Law Project Director
It is with great honor and pleasure to announce that Kelli Kazmarski has assumed the role of Project Director for Vermont Legal Aid’s Disability Law Project (DLP). Kelli transitioned into this role on June 17, 2024.
Kelli Kazmarski has been a staff attorney in the Poverty Law Project at Vermont Legal Aid since 2016. Her primary responsibilities were representing clients with disabilities in Social Security cases involving cessation of disability benefits due to medical improvement or work, as well as cases involving overpayments of disability benefits. Before the pandemic Kelli was VLA’s unemployment specialist, representing clients in unemployment benefit cases, about 30% of which also involved disability issues. Kelli trained other staff to help with the deluge of unemployment cases during the pandemic, and she was the lead attorney in VLA’s 2022 class action lawsuit against the Department of Labor for months-long delays in holding unemployment appeals hearings. Kelli and the team working on the case successfully negotiated a very favorable settlement for unemployed Vermont workers. Kelli was Legal Aid’s point person in the legislature on unemployment issues from 2021-2023. She has provided many trainings on Social Security benefits and on unemployment compensation benefits to staff at Hireability, designated agencies, the Agencies on Aging and others.
Kelli began her professional legal career in the mid-1990s, when she was a founding partner in a small law firm in Newport, VT. After her children were born, she took a leave of absence from the law and held a variety of positions including those of stay-at-home mom and homeschooler, co-owner of a children’s book and toy store, and teacher, all in the Northeast Kingdom. Several years of teaching middle school made Kelli long for the relative peace and calm of practicing law, a career path to which she always hoped to return. The opportunity at Vermont Legal Aid appeared soon after.
Kelli is very excited to have joined the Disability Law Project beginning June 17, 2024, and looks forward to supporting the work of her colleagues in the DLP who daily help children and adults with disabilities thrive in Vermont.
Please join us in welcoming Kelli into her new journey as DLP project director! We are so grateful to have her at the helm and look forward to all the meaningful and impactful work her and her team will do to improve the lives of Vermonters with disabilities.
—Yasmin Dwedar, Executive Director