Gavriel Schreiber’s workdays are varied. He could be making edits to a contract, working on a speech or helping with plans for the Chiefs Super Bowl parade.
In his position as general counsel for the office of the mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, he has a wide range of responsibilities.
Schreiber said the first thing to know about his job is that he is the lawyer in the mayor’s office, a different role than that of the city attorney, which is the lawyer for Kansas City, Missouri. Schreiber’s legal duties cover the needs of the mayor, whether that be litigation that involves the mayor’s office, negotiating a contract, helping the mayor draft ordinances or writing speeches and planning press conferences.
Schreiber moved to Kansas City with his family in 2009 when he was in high school. His father, Jacob Schreiber, was executive director of The J from 2009 to 2015, and his mother, Edna Levy, was a teacher at Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy. As a student at Blue Valley North High School, he was active in the B’nai Brith Youth Organization.
Schreiber got his bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland and his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School.
“I’d been interested in public service for much of my life; that was behind a lot of my decision to go to the University of Maryland, a school right near D.C.,” he said.
Learning about what energized him — reading, writing, thinking critically about problems — made him realize that law was a way to do the type of work he enjoyed and apply it to public or community service.
Before he finished law school, he had secured two jobs for the next two years. The first was a one-year clerkship in Denver, Colorado, with the United States District Court, followed by a one-year position in Kansas City with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
For Schreiber, returning to Kansas City in 2022 was “a bit serendipitous.”
“I’d always been interested in coming back to KC, but I didn’t know whether that would be in the cards for me, or whether career and personal interests would take me in all types of different directions,” he said.
Many of his law school classmates took jobs on the coasts, mostly in New York or Washington, D.C., and a few in Boston or Los Angeles. That was the “well-trodden” path after graduation, but Schreiber’s time in Kansas City gave him an appreciation for the Midwest and cities others might overlook.
Like moving back to Kansas City, getting his job with the mayor’s office last year was also serendipitous. Not only was the timing of the position opening in Schreiber’s favor, but Schreiber also already had a professional relationship with Mayor Quinton Lucas. They both clerked for Eighth Circuit Judge Duane Benton, who introduced the two. Schreiber was able to get to know Mayor Lucas, who shared a similar path of leaving Kansas City to attend law school and then returning for his career, personally and professionally.
“[Mayor Lucas] cares a lot about using his office and his influence, broadly speaking, during his time in City Hall to help build the next generation of leaders in Kansas City,” Schreiber said. “I think he partially sees his role as giving young ambitious people the opportunity to do impactful public service work so that they can start their careers in Kansas City on a good trajectory to have decades and decades of impactful public service work.”
For Schreiber, one of the best parts of the job is seeing the projects he’s contributed to go into action and the positive impact they can have on Kansas City and its residents. A recent project he worked on was an ordinance that banned source-of-income discrimination in housing in Kansas City, meaning that landlords can no longer keep people who have non-traditional income streams (such as social security disability benefits, veterans benefits, alimony payments or housing vouchers) from applying for properties.
“...I provide edits on some type of contract or development deal, and then it’s signed and buildings start to go up,’” he said about some of his job processes. “... (Or) they bring me a draft and I make edits, and we work on it together, and then next thing I know, the city council is voting on it and actual political leaders are thinking hard about these ideas.”
“I feel very grateful to have that opportunity,” he continued, “particularly at this point in my career. It’s cool to be able to see a tangible impact of what you’re doing.”
Like he was as a teen, Schreiber is once again involved with the Kansas City Jewish community. He’s a member of the board for Jewish Community Relations Bureau | AJC Kansas City, has attended several of Jewish Federation’s Young Adults Division events and takes part in Jewish study at Congregation Beth Shalom.
“The Jewish community was so welcoming to me and my family when we first moved here in 2009,” he said. “Coming back to Kansas City, after almost a decade away… it’s been nice to see that many of the same people and many new people are just as kind and welcoming.”