U.S. Army veteran Supreme Dow is always on the move. He travels across Los Angeles, providing nutritious meals to unhoused people through the community organization he founded, the Harvest Academy. In a bid to set a world record, his group dished out more than 1,000 meals in 37 minutes. But for nearly two decades, after leaving the Army at age 19, he faced a series of destabilizing hardships, including a period when he slept in his car in downtown Los Angeles.

Now reflecting on his journey from homelessness to helping others, Dow credits UCLA School of Law's Veterans Legal Clinic with playing a key role.

Dow grew up in Philadelphia, where family and friends instilled in him a commitment to public service. He enlisted in the Army as a teenager, but after experiencing trauma during his service, he went absent without leave and was discharged soon after. At times, he says, he contemplated suicide. Eventually, he sought therapy at the West Los Angeles VA, but he continued to struggle to secure medical benefits amid a confusing welter of paperwork. It was dispiriting. “I wasn’t a person,” he says. “I was a number.”

And then, Dow says, he learned of a lifeline. “People kept telling me about the UCLA Veterans Legal Clinic and the free help it provides for veterans,” he says. “I knew that these are people who invest the best part of themselves to help those who really need it.”

Dow was paired with one of those very students, Mike Dickerson ’25, who worked in the clinic for three semesters. Over seven months, Dickerson helped Dow assemble evidence, navigate VA procedures, and document the effects of the trauma he experienced in uniform. The effort resulted in a “100% service-connected disability rating,” a successful administrative outcome that helped Dow secure housing, reconnect with his family, and begin rebuilding his life.

“The clinic made me feel like a human being,” Dow says. “They helped me get my story told, and Mike helped me get what was rightfully due to me.”

The Veterans Legal Clinic launched in 2017 at the West Los Angeles VA. It gives law students, including some who have served in the military themselves, hands-on experience helping veterans navigate legal challenges involving housing, health care, employment, reentry from incarceration and other needs.

Dickerson has since graduated and is now a public interest lawyer with the Trial Impact Project in L.A., where he is a fellow focusing on police accountability and detention conditions. This builds on his own experiences, including when, before law school, he filed a lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles challenging the seizure and destruction of possessions that unhoused people owned. That work piqued in Dickerson a strong interest in helping those who face dire life circumstances, and his later endeavors in the clinic only emboldened his commitment.

“Going forward in my career, I hope to continue representing people in a way that promotes the public interest and that helps people who otherwise might not have access to good representation,” he says.

Dickerson notes that Dow’s case illustrated a central challenge in veterans-benefits advocacy: bringing a veteran’s experience into the language and documentation that the VA requires. “It was really about aligning his narrative with the existing records,” Dickerson says. “Veterans are more than capable of telling their own stories. Translating that story in a way that will make the VA listen – that’s the harder part.”

But there is little doubt that their hard work paid off.

Even before he had secured his full benefits, Dow had started helping those who, like him, live life on the brink. In 2019, he began organizing meal distributions and established the Harvest Academy. Its 10,000 Meals Across L.A. initiative provided about 1,000 meals a week for a year, and then it expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, Dow says the Harvest Academy helps shelters and other social service organizations develop nutritious, culturally relevant food programs. For people transitioning out of homelessness, the program offers cooking demonstrations and lessons in grocery shopping and budgeting.

Dow is at home these days, serving others in the way that was ingrained in him as a child. But he is always itching to do more – and make even more of an impact in the lives of others, just as the Veterans Legal Clinic helped him.

“Mike Dickerson took pride in getting the job done. He cared about my end goal,” Dow says. “It helped me build my life back.”