Legal Services Corporation

The Legal Services Corporation (LSC) is a publicly funded, 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation established by the United States Congress. It seeks to ensure equal access to justice under the law for all Americans by providing funding for civil legal aid to those who otherwise would be unable to afford it. The LSC was created in 1974 with bipartisan congressional sponsorship and the support of the Nixon administration, and LSC is funded through the congressional appropriations process.
LSC has a board of eleven directors, appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate, that set LSC policy. By law the board is bipartisan; no more than six members can come from the same party. LSC has a president and other officers who implement those policies and oversee the corporation's operations.
For Fiscal Year 2018, LSC had an appropriation of $410 million in the federal budget to fund civil legal aid. LSC is the largest single funder of civil legal aid in the country, distributing more than 90 percent of its total funding to 132 independent nonprofit legal aid programs.
For Fiscal Year 2019, Congress appropriated $415 million to LSC to fund civil legal aid. LSC is the largest single funder of civil legal aid in the country, distributing more than 90 percent of its total funding to 132 independent nonprofit legal aid programs.
History.
Background.
LSC is one of the organizational descendants of the former Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, a key part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society vision, established the OEO. Building on the work of a 1964 essay, "The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective" by Edgar Cahn and Jean Camper Cahn, in 1965 OEO budgeted $1 million per year to create and fund 269 local legal services programs around the country, such as California Rural Legal Assistance, which made a name for themselves suing local officials and sometimes stirring up resentment against their federal funding. Jean Cahn was the first director of the National
Legal Services Program in OEO.
By the early 1970s the Nixon administration began dismantling the OEO; funding for legal services for the poor began to wither, and supporters looked for an alternative arrangement. In 1971 a bipartisan congressional group, including Senators Ted Kennedy, William A. Steiger, and Walter Mondale, proposed a national, independent Legal Services Corporation; at the same time, administration officials such as Attorney General John N. Mitchell and chief domestic advisor John Ehrlichman were proposing their own somewhat similar solution.
Creation and the Ford era.
The idea behind the LSC was to create a new corporate entity that would be funded by Congress but run independently, with eleven board members to be appointed by the President, subject to Senate confirmation.
LSC was created by the Legal Services Corporation Act of 1974 (). The LSC Act contains certain rules and restrictions regarding what LSC grantees can do. The initial budget was set at $90 million.
Naming and confirmation of the first LSC board was delayed by inaction and opposition, but by July 1975, President Gerald R. Ford had named and the Senate had approved the first board, with Cornell University Law School Dean Roger Conant Cramton as its first chair. South Dakota legal services lawyer ad prosector Bill Janklow was another member of the initial board.
Debate existed from the start among the board members as to whether LSC's role should be the same as the OEO's of using lawsuits and other means to attack broad underlying difficulties of the poor or whether the focus should be more narrowly defined to addressing small, specific situations. The LSC Act said that the organization was to pursue "equal access to justice," but Cramton wrote that while the law was intended to proscribe the blatantly-political objects of the 1960s OEO's work, it was worded ambiguously.
Carter era.
In December 1977, President Jimmy Carter nominated Hillary Rodham to the board of directors of the LSC, for a term to expire in July 1980. Rodham, an attorney with Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas and the wife of Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton, had a background in children's law and policy and had worked in providing legal services for the poor while at Yale Law School. She had also done 1976 campaign coordination work for Carter in Indiana. This was a recess appointment, so Rodham took her place on the board without immediate Senate confirmation. Rodham was nominated again in January 1978 as a regular appointment. In mid-1978, the Carter administration chose the thirty-year-old Rodham to become chair of the board, the first woman to become so. The position entailed her traveling monthly from Arkansas to Washington, D.C. for two-day meetings.
During Rodham's Senate confirmation hearings, she subscribed to the philosophy that LSC should seek to reform laws and regulations that it viewed as "unresponsive to the needs of the poor." Rodham was successful in getting increases in Congressional funding for LSC, stressing its usual role in providing low-income people with attorneys to assist them in commonplace legal issues and framed its funding as being neither a liberal nor a conservative cause. By her third year on the LSC board, Rodham had gotten the LSC budget tripled. Opposition to LSC during this time came from both Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner, who favored a "judicare" approach of compensating private lawyers for work done for the poor, and Conservative Caucus head Howard Phillips, who objected to LSC representing gays.
LSC funding was at its highest-ever mark, in inflation adjusted dollars, in fiscal 1980, with a budget of $303 million. Some 6,200 poverty lawyers filed suits using its funds on behalf of 1.5 million eligible poor clients; the lawyers won almost 80 percent of their cases, which mostly involved divorces, evictions, repossessions, and interrupted payments from federal agencies. For fiscal 1981 it was budgeted at $321 million.
In June 1980, Carter renominated Rodham for another term on the board, to expire in July 1983. Sometime between about April 1980 and September 1980, F. William McCalpin replaced her as chair of the board. He would remain chair through late 1981.
Reagan era.
LSC was strongly opposed by some political groups. As Governor of California in the 1960s, Ronald Reagan had advocated elimination of all federal subsidies for free legal services to the poor in civil cases, and had tried to block a grant to California Rural Legal Assistance in 1970. Indeed, "Time" magazine would state, "Of all the social programs growing out of the Great Society, there is none that Ronald Reagan dislikes more than the Legal Services Corporation." The CRLA's executive director would characterize Reagan's attitude towards the organization as akin to that of Darth Vader.
When President Reagan took office in January 1981, he attempted to eliminate the LSC by zero funding it. Supporters of LSC rallied to defend it; American Bar Association president W. Reece Smith, Jr. led 200 lawyers to Washington to press its case. In response to Reagan's clear intentions against the LSC, the Coalition for Legal Services was formed to lobby outside, but on behalf of the LSC, which showed support via grant recipients.
The U.S. House Judiciary Committee blocked Reagan's zero-funding action in May 1981, but did cut financing to $260 million for both of the next two years as well as place additional restrictions on LSC lawyers. By the following month, the now Republican-controlled U.S. Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee had cut proposed financing to $100 million, as part of what "The New York Times" deemed an "increasingly bitter ideological struggle". Moreover, Reagan administration officials accused LSC of having "concealed and understated" its lobbying activity and support for politically motivated legislation.
In November 1981, the Reagan administration, although still hoping to eliminate LSC, decided to replace all eleven LSC board members with nominations of their own. In return the LSC began to setup "mirror corporations" to circumvent congressional restrictions and reuse funds for political advocacy. The proposed new chairman was Ronald Zumbrun, president of the ideologically opposite Pacific Legal Foundation, which had previously defended the state of California against several legal aid lawsuits. For fiscal 1982, LSC's budget was reduced by 25 percent to $241 million, with new rules prohibiting most class action suits and lobbying. Zumbrun's nomination was sufficiently controversial that in January 1982, the Reagan administration dropped it, and instead made a recess appointment of William J. Olson to be chair. Olson had headed the Reagan transition team dealing with LSC and had personally recommended its abolition, so LSC advocates were not mollified.
At the same time, the Reagan administration had named six other board members as recess appointments. In February 1982, the Carter-appointed members of the previously existing board filed suit to against the recess appointments, claiming they were unlawful and that they should be enjoined from holding meetings. Rodham hired fellow Rose Law Firm associate Vince Foster to represent her in the case and to seek a restraining order against Reagan. The Reagan nominees may have been prohibited from meeting with the Legal Service Corporation before confirmation.
Rodham also prodded Senate Democrats to vote against Reagan's nominees. The nominees did undergo heavy criticism in Congress, with one labeled a bigot and Olson lambasted for his transition position. In March 1982, yet another new chair was named, Indiana University law professor William F. Harvey, although Olson would remain on the board. Harvey and Rodham had a conference call in which Rodham reiterated her desire for the lawsuit. That action, "McCalpin v. Dana", was decided in favor of the defendants by summary judgment in October 1982.
By December 1982, the Senate was willing to confirm six of Reagan's more moderate nominees, but not Harvey, Olson, and another; the Reagan administration instead pulled the names of all of them. This board then closed its last meeting in a public debacle, with Olson lambasting LSC as full of "abuses and rampant illegality" and a "waste of the taxpayers' money through the funding of the left," while being harangued by a hostile audience. And too, the Reagan appointees to the board were being criticized for collecting substantially higher fees than previous board members.
In September 1983 the General Accounting Office found that in early 1981, LSC officials and its local affiliates had used federal funds in assembling opposition to Reagan's efforts to eliminate LSC, and that this use had been in violation of the LSC Act's restrictions against such political activity. Such actions against the LSC Act were not crimes, and the GAO report did not claim any crimes had taken place. The investigation had been initiated by the LSC in 1983 ordering a series of "raids" on their own offices to attempt to discover evidence of questionable actions taken by the LSC in 1981, prompting "Time" magazine to declare LSC "an organization at war with itself."
More recess appointments were made by Reagan in late 1983, in 1984, and in early 1985, with again none of them being confirmed by the Senate. Indeed, LSC's board would go a total of three and a half years populated by recess appointments. Finally in June 1985 the Senate confirmed the latest batch of Reagan nominations. The Carter board lawsuit, since renamed and appealed as "McCalpin v. Durant" to the United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit, was then decided later in June 1985 as moot.
George H. W. Bush era.
Overt White House hostility towards LSC ended with the George H. W. Bush administration, with calls for level funding rather than decreases. Under board chair George Wittgraff, LSC began to ease relations with private lawyers and with state grantees. In fiscal 1992, LSC saw a funding increase back to $350 million.
Clinton era.
Hillary Rodham's husband, the aforementioned Bill Clinton, took office as U.S. President in January 1993. The first two years of the Clinton administration saw more growth for LSC, as former chair McCalpin returned to the board and the previous former chair Hillary was now First Lady of the United States. Funding rose to a high mark in absolute terms of $400 million for fiscal years 1994 and 1995.
Things turned upon the advent of the Republican Revolution. In fiscal 1996, once the Republican party had taken over Congress the year prior, LSC had its funding cut again, from $400 million to $278 million. A new set of much more extensive restrictions were added to LSC grantees. The organization's supporters expressed disappointment that the Clinton administration did not make LSC a critical priority in its budget battles with the Republican Congress, especially given Hillary Clinton's former role in it.
As part of a comprehensive "welfare reform" of federal welfare laws beginning in 1996, most significantly the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, Congress imposed restrictions on the types of work that LSC grantee legal services organizations could engage in. For example, LSC-funded organizations could no longer serve as counsel in class action lawsuits challenging the way public benefits are administered. Additionally, LSC grantees faced tightened restrictions on representing immigrants, specifically those illegally in the country. However, in 2001, the restriction on welfare advocacy was ruled unconstitutional in "Legal Services Corp. v. Velazquez".
However, non-LSC funded organizations are not subject to these restrictions leading the legal services community to adopt a two-track approach: LSC restricted counsel taking on individual clients but not engaging in class actions, and non-restricted counsel (using private donor funding) both taking on individuals as well as engaging in otherwise restricted litigation. Poverty lawyers in both tracks still work together where they can, being careful not to run afoul of LSC restrictions.
George W. Bush era.
In 2004, veteran Legal Aid Society attorney Helaine M. Barnett was named President of the LSC.
According to LSC's 2009 report "Documenting the Justice Gap in America: The Current Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-Income Americans," all legal aid offices nationwide, LSC-funded or not, were together able to meet only about 20 percent of the estimated legal needs of low-income people in the United States.
For 2007, LSC had a budget of some $350 million.
Obama era.
In 2009 during the Obama administration, the LSC was on the path to getting a $50 million increase in its $390 million budget.
However, the LSC came under criticism from Senator Charles Grassley, who said, "There's just a lot of money being wasted," citing several General Accounting Office and Inspector General reports.
By fiscal 2011, the annual budget amount for the LSC was $420 million. In early 2011, House now-majority Republican proposed a $75 million reduction in that current-year amount, while Obama's suggestion budget proposed a $30 million increase for the subsequent year.
On December 16, 2014, the President signed into law the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act for FY 2015 that includes $375 million for LSC.
Trump era.
Since 2017, the Trump administration has called for the elimination of funding for LSC. LSC has strong bipartisan support on behalf of robust funding for LSC. External stakeholders, including members of the legal and business communities, state attorneys general, and law school deans across the country send letters to the House and Senate appropriations committees advocating for robust funding for LSC. They include:
In addition, 209 members of the House of Representatives signed a bipartisan letter in support of funding for LSC, the largest number in history, and 46 bipartisan Senators signed a similar letter in support of funding for LSC.
Restrictions.
Due to the up-and-down nature of LSC's political history, there are many restrictions on lobbying, advocacy, and general impact work which apply to LSC-funded organizations. Here they are broken into categories of expressly forbidden, forbidden with LSC funds, and expressly permitted.
Recipients may never:
Recipients may, with non-LSC funding:
In many of their regulations, LSC only states activities that their funding cannot be used to support. In 45 CFR 1610.2(c)–(h), however, several different types of non-LSC funding are defined:
With these definitions in mind, 45 CFR 1610.4 goes on to specify what each type of funding can be used for:
In addition, the category of general non-LSC funds may be used to:
Recipients may, with any funding:
Board of directors.
LSC is headed by an 11-member Board of Directors appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. By law, the Board is bipartisan: no more than six members may be of the same political party. The current composition of the board is:
The chairs of the LSC board throughout its history have included:
Headquarters.
By law, LSC's headquarters is located in Washington, D.C. In the 1970s and 1980s, LSC also had regional offices. LSC currently has one office in Washington D.C. that administers all of LSC's work. LSC itself does not provide legal representation to the poor.
Grant recipients.
Alabama
Alaska
American Samoa
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Guam
Hawaii

Brian Syron

Brian Syron (19 November 1934 – 14 October 1993) was a human rights advocate, teacher, actor, writer, stage director and Australia's first Indigenous feature film director, who has been recognised as the first First Nations feature film director.
Life.
He was born on 19 November 1934 in Eora country in the inner city suburb of Balmain, Sydney, New South Wales.
Syron also lived an Indigenous life with his paternal grandmother in his ancestral Birrippi lands at Minimbah, New South Wales, seven miles (11 km) up the Coolongolook River from Forster and north of Balmain. Minimbah means in Birripi language "Home of the Teacher" and his traditional country encompassed Taree, Forster and the Great Lakes area of the Wang Wauk and Coolonglook rivers on the North Coast. He was a child of a bicultural marriage with his mother coming from the coal fields of Yorkshire, England. His paternal dreaming was the Eagle, although he described himself as a Magpie - half black, half white. He was also exposed to Aboriginal reserve life at Purfleet and Forster through the 1930s and early 1940s, and spent time as a 14- and 15-year-old in Grafton Correctional Centre. Even with this background, Syron told the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) on 15 November 1992:
Brian Syron died of leukaemia on 14 October 1993 in his Eora country birthplace.
Theatrical career.
Syron began his artistic career in 1960 at the Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli, Sydney under the guidance of New York trained American actor/director and esteemed teacher of the Strasberg Method, the late Hayes Gordon. His fellow students included Jack Thompson, Clarissa Kaye Mason, Reg Livermore and John Ewing. Syron always believed that it was Gordon who gave him the dream to be part of the theatre by allowing him to experiment, expand and create.
Wishing to travel overseas, Syron was forced to deny that he was Indigenous in order to obtain an Australian passport. This was because Indigenous Australians were not allowed to have passports. Syron left Australia in 1961 to work in Europe as a male model with Dior, Cardin and Balenciaga. In the Fall of 1961, he moved to New York living initially on Fifth Avenue with one of Australia's first supermodels, Pauline Kiernan, and later in a small walk up when he became an acting student again. In September 1961, he was accepted as a student with the Stella Adler Studio, where he studied for the next 18 months with fellow students Robert De Niro, Gloria Graham, Pamela Tiffen, Warren Beatty and Peter Bogdanovich. Then followed two years of study under various teachers including Olympia Dukakis, Sanford Meisner, William Bell and Rose Ingram while continuing study with Adler. As a result of this 3½ years of training, Syron became the first Australian to study with Stella Adler and one of the few Australians to have learned the Stanislavsky drama technique from so close to the source.
Completing his American training, he spent 12 months in Britain studying with Cicily Berry as well as Doreen Cannon, head of acting, at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before returning to New York. There, he co-founded a theatre company based around the Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs, upstate New York while touring as a director with the Boston/Herald Travellers Shakespeare Company with such actors as Spalding Gray and Clara Duff-McCormack and doing stints as a teacher for Adler's studio. In 1965, Mrs. Hollister Rexford Shause donated the Caffè Lena theatre company on the Mohawk River near Schenectady to build a theatre complex. Following this donation, Syron returned to New York, where he worked as an actor on various American Shakespeares festivals, toured through the Appalachian Mountains and worked with the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival in Louisville, Kentucky, Cincinnati in the Park, as well as productions in Ohio, New Jersey and Paducah, Kentucky.
As well as touring, he worked as an actor with the Establishment Theatre Company for producers Sybill Burton Christopher, Joseph E. Levine, Ivor David Balding, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. He worked for The New Theatre on 53rd and 3rd and various productions including the revue "The Mad Show".
In the last months of 1967 and the first of 1968 Syron toured the Southern states of America playing in Atlanta, Georgia; Roanoke, Virginia; Nashville, Tennessee and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. Syron considered the finalisation of his black politicisation came from these tours in times of peace marches, race riots and other civil unrest. 
Syron returned to Perth, Western Australia following the 1967 referendum. In Perth, he directed at Aarne Neeme's The Playhouse, Perth. He had hardly time to settle into Perth before he was invited to return to Sydney and direct "Fortune and Men's Eyes" at his old alma mater the Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli for which he received the Inaugural Drama Critics Award for Best Production and his leading man Max Phipps received Best Actor for his role of "Queenie".
On his return from the United States in late 1970, Syron was invited to join Sydney's Old Tote Theatre by Professor Robert Quentin, Head of Drama at the University of New South Wales, and Robin Lovejoy, Artistic Director. He was the first Indigenous Australia to work as a director in the mainstream Australian theatre industry and in 1972 was appointed Theatre Consultant for the Aboriginal Arts Board of the inaugural Australia Council for the Arts which Board was headed for the first time by an indigenous person, Wanjuk Marika.
The following year, 1973, Syron co-founded the Australian National Playwrights Conference with Katharine Brisbane. Lloyd Richards, Head of Acting at Yale University and Artistic Director of the American National Playwrights Conference wrote to the Aboriginal Unit of Australia Council in September 1993
I have been asked to comment on Brian Syron whom I have not heard of in many years. I am nonetheless not hesitant to do so because his contribution to the theatre and to his people had by the late 70s been so significant that he might have been considered for award by then. The National Playwrights Conference of Australia exists because Brian Syron visited the National Playwrights Conference in Waterford Conn. and recognised it as an important idea for Australia and he went back to champion the possibility. Others visited and the rest is history." 
Syron returned to the theatre again in 1976 with his direction of "Dimboola" (written by Jack Hibberd) in Newcastle as well as at Bonapartes Theatre Restaurant, Kings Cross, Sydney where his stage production ran continuously for the next two years and four months. He followed "Dimboola" with a production of the American play "Falling Apart" at the New Theatre, Newtown, Sydney and in 1978 he played the role of "The Actor" in Livieu Cieleu's production of Maxim Gorky's "The Lower Depths" which ran for six weeks at the Sydney Opera House. In this same year, he opened The New Group Theatre at the All Nations Club, Kings Cross, Sydney where he directed among other productions "A Tribute to Tennessee Williams" before the ongoing costs of keeping an independent theatre going forced Syron to close after 12 months.
Syron co-founded the Aboriginal Theatre Company (ATC) in 1981 with Robert Merritt, scriptwriter/playwright/director and, in conjunction with the Aboriginal Educational Unit of TAFE, was the founder of the Eora Arts Centre, Redfern, Sydney. The first production of the ATC was Merritt's play "The Cake Man" which toured under Syron's direction, to the 1982 World Theatre Festival in Denver, Colorado where the play received a tremendous audience response. Following this success, the play then toured various colleges around the United States. Returning to Australia, Syron directed a season of "The Cake Man" at the Universal Theatre in Fitzroy, Melbourne after which it was funded by Australian federal government's Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs to play at the 1983 "Warana" - Commonwealth Arts Festival, Brisbane in Queensland where it was performed at the Edward Street Theatre.
In January 1987, Syron founded the National Black Playwrights Conference (NPBC), which was held at the Australian National University, Canberra. In an interview with Angela Bennie, Australia's leading Indigenous actress Justine Saunders commented :
It was Brian Syron, in fact, who was the instigator not only of the first National Black Playwrights Conference but the National Playwrights Conference. Syron always said our culture is an oral one, it comes through our painting, through our singing, through our stories that's how we pass down our laws, that's how we have passed down our history for 60,000 years
During the conference, the delegates awarded Syron the 1987 Inaugural Harold Blair Award for his Lifetime Achievements in the Performing Arts, which brought with it the additional honor of the title "Elder". As a result of the first NBPC, Syron proposed and co-founded the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust (ANTT) with headquarters in King Street, Newtown under Administrator, scriptwriter Vivian Walker (son of poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and brother of actor Dennis Walker), Chair, actor Lydia Miller and directors Justine Saunders, Rhoda Roberts, Lillian Crombie and Syron. ANTT closed in 1991 following the very early death of Vivian Walker.
At the second NBPC held in 1988 Syron directed a video of Jimmy Chi's stage musical "Bran Nue Dae" produced by Chi who travelled from Broome in Western Australia to Macquarie University at North Ryde, Sydney to take part in the event.
Syron carried out a two-week workshop, a stage reading, plus a production in 1991 at the Belvoir Street Theatre, Redfern, Sydney of Mudrooroo Narogin's "courageous and brave new play" "The Aboriginal Demonstrators Confront the Declaration of the Australian Republic on 26 January 2001 with the Production of "Der Auftrag" by Heiner Muller" and starring Justine Saunders, Michael Watson, David Kennedy, Pamela Young, Ray Kelly and Graham Cooper. The play and the production are also the subject of Mudrooroo Narogin's book "The Mudrooroo/Muller Project - A Theatrical Casebook", with a chapter by Syron and edited by Gerhard Fischer in collaboration with leading indigenous academic Paul Behrendt and Syron.
Theatre credits - directing.
U.S.A. - 1960s
Australia - 1960s
1970s
1990s
Theatre Credits - Acting
U.S.A. - 1960s
Australia - 1970s
Teaching career.
Following the success of "Fortune", Syron was approached by Sydney drama professionals to set up the Actors Master Class for those interested in studying the Stanislavsky/Adler technique and for which Syron had applied to his award-winning production. Following on the success of the Master Class, Syron was requested to introduce an Intermediate classes and then a Beginners class, both of limited numbers. The School was kept open on an ad hoc basis over the next 23 years and moved many times between 1969 and 1992.
In 1969 Syron taught the first group of urban Aboriginal actors to every study Stanislavsky or acting from an Indigenous perspective. The classes were held at the Foundation of Aboriginal Affairs, George Street (near Central railway station), Sydney CBD and the actors included political and cultural historian/actor Denis Walker (son of leading Australian poet Oodroonoo Nunuccal) and actor/director/historian Gary Foley. The situation was still so bad that at the end of each evening the actors had to be ferried back by taxi to their homes in Redfern about 10 minutes walk away to avoid arrest by the police.
He followed this in the early 1972 with workshops and acting classes held at the Black Theatre Arts & Cultural Centre (aka Black Theatre), Cope Street, Redfern where, as Artistic Director, he taught such future Indigenous luminaries as Jack Davis, Hyllus Maris, Lester Bostock, Maureen Watson and Gerry Bostock.
In 1973, as a foundation member of the Peter Summerton Foundation, Syron organised with his mentor Stella Adler to travel to Australia and conduct a series of Master Classes for people from all areas of the Australian entertainment industries. This was the only time Ms. Adler travelled to Australia. As a result of these classes, Syron instigated The Artists' Group Theatre with the first workshops being held in the sculpture studio of Ron Robertson-Swann before moving to The Stables, Kings Cross. During this year he was invited to teach drama to The Resurgent Society inmates of Parramatta Gaol. He accepted the offer and was involved with the Society for the next 12 months. His group included playwrights Jim McNeil and Robin Thurston and Syron is believed to be the first drama teacher to work in the prison system of New South Wales.
At the end of 1974 Syron returned to Los Angeles to take up a Stella Adler's invitation to work at the Stella Adler Los Angeles Acting Studio on Hollywood Boulevard with such students as John Barrymore Jr., John Saxon, Susan Clark and Peter Brown.
Leading Indigenous academic and Harvard University, USA graduate, Dr Roberta Sykes set up the Black Women's Action Group in 1985 with Syron as the (anonymous) Honorary Secretary and foundation member joining other Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in the support of the educational advancement of Indigenous women in their pursuit of academic success at leading international universities.
Over the period 1986–1987 Syron became the first Indigenous Australian to lecture at the Australian Film TV & Radio School (AFTRS) when he gave a series of Master Classes covering "The Textual Analysis and Techniques of Acting" for Final Year AFTRS students in the Directors Course. In Australia's Bi-Centennial Year, 1988, Syron, as representative of actors and the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust, was invited back to AFTRS as a Guest Lecturer for the "Writing '88" Course along with Fay Nelson (Lecturer in Storytelling/Aboriginal Arts Board), Tjungkarta "Nosepeg" Tjupurrula (Pintubi Storyteller) and Harper Morris Tyungerrayi (Anmatjuo Storyteller).
Television career.
Syron was employed as Children's Dialogue Coach on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation ABC-TVs award-winning television production "Seven Little Australians" (1974) a 10 × 30-minute series adapted from the Ethel Turner novel of the same name. In 1976 Syron was cast as Sweet William in the television adaptation of the Robert Merritt play "The Cake Man" (1977). Almost immediately after this production Syron was cast as Ray in "Ray's Story" a one-hour episode of "Pig in a Poke" (1977) a 5 × 1 hour series screened on ABC-TV starring Justine Saunders, Athol Compton, Gary Foley and Paul Coe and described as the first modern urban Aboriginal drama screened on Australian television. Syron then played the leading role of "The Wife Abuser" in director Stephen Wallace's telemovie "Women Who Kill" (1983) which screened on ATN Channel 9.
In 1987 Syron was executive producer of the documentary-drama film production "Karbara: First Born" (1987), directed and produced by Richard Guthrie, during and following the 1987 Australian National Playwrights Conference. The film featured Lydia Miller and Ernie Dingo and screened at the Sydney Film Festival in 1987 and on ABC-TV.
Syron and Justine Saunders were co-presenters of the ABC-TV Aboriginal entertainment series "The First Australians" (1988–1990). This series of 18 × 1 hour programs featured leading Aboriginals in the fields of performance, music and art and presented Indigenous Australian political and commercial leaders in discussions on various topics important to Indigenous Australians. In September 1988 Syron became the first Aboriginal producer at ABC-TV when he was appointed to the position of Producer - Aboriginal Programs Unit. "The appointment of Brian Syron by the ABC as producer of its new Aboriginal Programs Unit could very well precipitate further muttering and grumbling...is it just another Bi Centennial cringe and guilt or is there a need and a reason for an Aboriginal; Unit ... the unification of culture is the only way to ensure their survival" 
Television
Production
Acting
Film career.
In 1970 Syron left Australia for the USA where he took up a position as Attachment / Assistant on the feature film "What's Up Doc?" directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Syron's next film project was the short film "Jeremy and Teapot" (1976) starring Patrick Thompson as Jeremy and Syron as Teapot with the Narrator Jack Thompson, shot on location at Thompson's property at Upper Bo Bo, via Ulong, northern New South Wales. The film went on to win Best Film, 1982 Women's International Film/Video Festival, Tucson, Arizona, USA..
Syron was employed on director Peter Weir's feature film "The Last Wave" (1977) as Consultant and Aboriginal Liaison with Gulpilil and Nandijiwarra Amagula, Walter Amagula, Roy Bara, Cedric Latara, Morris Latara and Athol Compton.
The Australian Film Commission awarded Syron a grant in 1980 for his script "Australian Aboriginal Achievers" (1980), which was a biographical documentary recounting the achievements of seven leading Aboriginal achievers: actor/historian Gary Foley, potter Thancoupie, artist Jean Jimmi, bureaucrat Charles Perkins, academic Miriam Rose Ungunmeer-Bauman and artists Jimmy Bienderry and Stumpy Martin Jempijimpa. The script never received production funding and was later used as the basis for the Clare Dunn book "People Under the Skin - An Irish Immigrant's Experience of Aboriginal Australia".
In 1981, Syron played a small role of "The Neighbour" in "The City's Edge" (1983) (aka "Running Man" "Edge of the City")", co-written by Robert Merritt the first Australian Indigenous scriptwriter of a feature film and the Nightclub Manager in "Coolangatta Gold" (1983).
"Backlash" (1986) directed and produced by Bill Bennett featured Lydia Miller with Syron in the role of The Executioner or Kadachi Man. Syron and the lead actors were the co-writers of this production although they were uncredited by Bennett. The script improvisation by the actors is confirmed by "Encore" 
"Bill Bennett's "Backlash", for instance, is a film for which the principals improvised their dialogue...in this his latest effort he tested this technique to its limit"
Syron and Rosalie Kunoth-Monks (aka Ngarla Kunoth, the star of "Jedda" in 1956) were employed as Co-Aboriginal Consultants on the television production "Naked Under Capricorn" (1989) directed by Rob Stewart, produced by Syron's brother-in-law Ray Alchin and starring Nigel Havers.
From 1990 to 1992 Syron directed the first feature film by an Indigenous Australia "Jindalee Lady" (1992) and is recognised as being the first First Nations director of a feature film. Dr Lowitja O'Donoghue, Chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission wrote saying Mr Syron is held in high esteem by both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians for his work as our first indigenous feature film director..He has made a valuable contribution to indigenous art in this country and has been a strong and articulate advocate in the movement to raise and promote the status of indigenous theatre and film as an integral part of Australia's cultural heritage" 
In August 1992 "Jindalee Lady" was invited to screen at the 1992 inaugural Brisbane International Film Festival as part of the first Charles Chauvel Tribute which was followed by a debate between Indigenous filmmaker Syron and three non-Indigenous filmmakers concerning the invisibility of Indigenous above-the-line personnel. In September 1992 "Jindalee Lady" was invited to "Dreamspeakers" International Film & Arts Festival, Edmonton, Canada where it was the only and the first feature film to be directed by a First Nations person and was awarded Best Feature Film at the Festival. Following this screening "Jindalee Lady" was accepted and nominated for the East West Award - Best Film at the 1992 Hawaii International Film Festival (HIFF), Hawaii where Syron gave a paper "The Making of an Indigenous Feature Film" at the opening of the Festival and the screening of "Jindalee Lady". Syron was joined by leading lady Lydia Miller and Musical Director / Composer Bart Willoughby at the HIFF.
Briann Kearney and Syron applied in a joint application for a Literary Fellowship from Australia Council the federal Arts organisation and were awarded $20,000 to co-write "Kicking Down the Doors - a History of Indigenous Filmmaking from 1968–1993 including non-Indigenous films for and about Indigenous people" based on research collected by Syron for his submission to the 1992 HREOC submission.
Filmography
Production
Acting