“Today is a pretty exciting day here,” Safe Passage Project executive director Rich Leimsider (MBA 2003) says as soon as he picks up the phone in late October 2019. “As of today, we are representing 1,001 children who the US government is actively trying to deport.”

It’s a huge accomplishment for the New York–based nonprofit, which was founded five years ago to provide legal assistance to young refugees who arrive in the United States alone. Launched with a single full-time employee, the organization had grown to 13 when Leimsider arrived in 2016. His mandate was to expand the organization. Today, there are 40 staffers working in partnership with 450 pro-bono attorneys to represent the 1,001 children who would not otherwise be able to afford an advocate.

These young migrants, most of whom arrived from Central America, have the law on their side, explains Leimsider. “They are fleeing tremendous violence—not just poverty, but also narco-terrorism, notorious corruption, high murder rates. These children make their own way from Central America through Mexico and they arrive at the southern border of United States alone.” If they are under 18 when they present themselves at the border, the children have the right to stay with family or friends in the United States while the immigration system determines if they meet the criteria to stay in the country. (Because New York has a large Central American community, the immigration crisis is felt acutely in the country’s largest city, nearly 2,000 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border.)

But having the law on your side and understanding how to navigate the legal system are two different things. Unlike in criminal court, there is no constitutional right to a lawyer in immigration court, leaving children to act as their own advocates. A recent study found that children who arrive at the southern border unaccompanied have an 85 percent chance of receiving a green card and a path to citizenship, but only if they have a lawyer representing them. Children in the same circumstances without a lawyer have only a 13 percent chance. “Of the 1,001 kids we represent, if they didn’t have Safe Passage, only 130 of them would win their cases,” Leimsider says. With legal assistance from Safe Passage, he estimates, about 900 of the children will win their cases.

But that’s not enough, says Leimsider. In his time as executive director, Leimsider has helped Safe Passage clarify its strategic goals. “We have a very specific understanding of what our job is. Our mission here is not simply to do as much good as we can, but to completely eliminate the problem in our area.” He estimates that for every child Safe Passage is currently assisting, there are three others in the New York area without legal help.

The need is staggering, but the path to meeting that need effectively would be familiar to any business leader, says Leimsider.

Leimsider began his career at the New York City Department for Homeless Services. There he witnessed the disconnect between those who ran the homeless shelters, who typically had a background in social work, and those who made the decisions about funding and resources in the main office, who typically had a business background. Leimsider combined those perspectives, having studied social work at the University of Texas at Austin before arriving at HBS. “My early career experiences really convinced me that so much of success in the social sector requires not only understanding problems at the grassroots level, but also having really solid management and leadership skills.”

For the first-time chief executive, that means managing growth—recruiting talent, developing office culture, finding room for everyone to sit, and, of course, fundraising to sustain the work—all while staying laser-focused on Safe Passage’s high-stakes mission. “No child should be forced to have to go back to an unbelievably violent situation without the minimum of a lawyer by their side,” Leimsider says. “We are going to have to rebuild an immigration system that sees children as children and treats them with all the care and support that any of us would want our own kids to get.”

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