[1] During his sophomore year of college he was vice president of the student council and led strikes against the school because of faculty and administrators who were antisemitic and racist.
[4] They moved to Schenectady, New York, and worked to organize a General Electric plant[5] except for a two-year hiatus from 1951-1953 where he served in the U.S. Army as a teacher and later as a lifeguard in Panama.
Despite renouncing the Communist Party he needed a letter of recommendation from anti-communist labor leader David Dubinsky to gain his law license.
[4] He then briefly transitioned to academia assisting Columbia Law School professor Monrad Paulsen with a study of juvenile courts.
[7] Sparer, instead of following the Vera Foundation's recommendation, pushed the organization to focus on impact litigation to change the institutions that created and sustained poverty.
[9] Sparer started the Center as the great need of individual clients' demands in neighborhood offices left little time to organize the strategic litigation.
[10] His two-tiered model allowed neighborhood lawyers and social workers in community-based offices to handle the day-to-day cases while the Center could partner for the impact litigation.