question: What does Mintie refer to as going from being an economic sacrifice to an economic impossibility? answer: That she will be out of funds by spring paragraph: Her career started more than 20 years ago in a garage behind a Catholic Worker soup kitchen on skid row in Los Angeles. She lived on a $3-a-week stipend that she spent on pantyhose and bus fare. Her law practice grew to an organization that brought in millions of dollars of damages through its cases against L.A. slumlords, allowing poor families to set up college funds and buy homes. In all those years, she never lost a case. When she stepped down, she had time to notice what was happening to the field of poverty law. "I realized with a shock that the work had really disintegrated and we had lost a whole generation of public-interest lawyers," she said. "It had gone from being an economic sacrifice as it was in my day to an economic impossibility. ... The whole system has essentially collapsed." Mintie also started to ask questions about the medical field. Almost every person who walks into a free medical clinic, she said, faces some legal problem such as an eviction or the loss of Social Security benefits. And many of her clients had medical problems from living in slum housing such as cockroaches lodged in ear canals and rat bite fever, a nonfatal malady that particularly affects children. Mintie noticed that health-care professionals were graduating with staggering debts and also couldn't afford to work with the poor. Her work was noticed by Oprah Winfrey, who invited her on the TV show March 26, 2001. Mintie received a $100,000 "Use Your Life Award" from Oprah's Angel Network, a nonprofit organization that awards money to those who help others. Mintie said that all of the money has gone to her recipients -- none was spent on overhead. She will be out of funds by spring. She is trying to get religious organizations to sponsor recipients. It is a secular organization, but one that grew out of Mintie's religious convictions. 