
Leaving The Window Open: Calming the Tension between Case Numbers, Impact Work, Equitably Sensitive Representation, Effective Supervision and Other Impossible "Asks" of our Public Interest Law Firms
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OAA Title III funds for providing legal services to seniors come with unique programmatic requirements. Every grantee must conduct community education sessions, and structured outreach activities in addition to the direct representation they provide clients. When COVID struck, we struggled not only with how to represent seniors in isolation, but with how to satisfy our education and outreach obligations. We developed a weekly Zoom meeting protocol, in which we discussed legal developments and our service provision innovations. We updated our legal workers on COVID related employment issues, the housing moratorium, as well as newly relevant technical issues, such as virtual notarization of documents, and then presented on these issues at the weekly meetings. As COVID progressed and then waned, the meetings became a forum for encouraging inter-office cooperation and collaboration, promoting the diverse expertise of our members. We changed our meeting schedule to every two weeks, and then to the current schedule of once a month. The federal Administration for Community Living (ACL) encouraged grantees to center its senior outreach around equitable principles, and we began discussing those as a team, and then implementing them as we progressed. This commitment and conversation was further developed when we sponsored the first firmwide in-person training meeting after COVID, featuring an interactive race equity exercise throughout extensive substantive and practical trainings. Our alignment-by-necessity of these deliverables, along with development our top/down effort to streamline these commitments has created a legal practice team which delivers impact work, strong support for individual representation, as well as critical policy work. Our mission and firm values are reflected in our progress toward equity-centered work. Our firm principles have become action points, and this has resulted in a rich work product created from existing firm resources.
- Identify and implement a broader, achievable vision of meaningful "impact work" for firm constituencies which buttresses their firm's mission and satisfies the demands of grantors and funders.
- Present practical suggestions for implementing multi-level demands in their firm's work in an integrative way which develops cooperative work within the firm, positively shaping firm culture.
- Devise a practical plan for the development of firm structure and work from the principles--such as connectedness, equity and accountability--which underlie the demands which can stymie our nonprofit work.
- Present to their firm leadership and legal workers a holistic action plan that helps resolve the tension between impact work, individual representation, and important policy work without requiring additional resources.
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Robert Bush, n/a
Statewide Director of Elder Law Unit
Georgia Legal Services Program, Inc.

Shannon Mills, n/a
Director of Attorney Recruitment, Diversity and Retention
Georgia Legal Services Program, Inc.
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