Reducing Intergenerational Family Violence and Trauma - "It Takes A Village"

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This presentation is focused on our Kinship Care Project to provide kinship care legal services for DV and other families in crisis. By keeping children of DV survivors out of the state foster care system, we ensure lessened trauma and more stabilities for families affected by family violence and other critical situations that lower-income families face. We represent grandparents, relatives, and fictive kin to care for children during a family crisis.

Understand that children thrive in family settings and work to assure that happens. Yet, practice and policy in states often place children in foster care, rather than with families.
Educate lawyers, judges, and advocates on legal child placement options to ensure children are with families through Guardianships, Custody, Powers of Attorneys, and Adoptions.
Ensure families get the financial supports, including public benefits for the children they are protecting, including Medicaid, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, Foster Care Daily rates, and Adoption Assistance.

Vicky Kimbrell, J.D.

Project Director

Georgia Legal Services Program (Main Branch)

Vicky O. Kimbrell - Ms. Kimbrell is the Georgia Legal Services Program Family Law specialist attorney leading the program's Family Law practice group. She is the Project Director of GLSP’s Benefits Hotlines and the GLSP Domestic Violence Project. She was recently awarded the Georgia Commission on Professionalism's Award Justice Benham Award. Ms. Kimbrell received the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence’s Impact Award and for her years of service to survivors. She also received the Georgia Asian Pacific American Bar Association’s Community Service award, the Emory Law School’s Public Interest Committee (EPIC) award, the Dan Bradley award from the State Bar of Georgia, the Family Violence Commission’s Gender Justice Award and the Director’s Award from the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council. She has litigated federal and state trial and appellate cases dealing with Medicaid, custody, child support, and juvenile law and has been published widely and trains statewide and nationally on these topics. Ms. Kimbrell currently serves on the Judicial Council’s Access to Justice Committee and on the Executive Committee of the Child Protection and Advocacy Section of the State Bar. Ms. Kimbrell was appointed to the Georgia Commission on Family Violence by several Governors, recognized by the Georgia legislature for her work on behalf of women, and previously served on the Committee on Justice for Children. She has trained statewide and nationally on Family and Health law topics and currently serves on the national Leadership Council of the National Council on Aging

Lyddy O'Brien

Lyddy O'Brien is a Supervising Attorney in the Piedmont Regional Office of Georgia Legal Services Program (GLSP), based in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a Double Dawg with undergraduate degrees from the University of Georgia and a J.D. from the University of Georgia School of Law. Since graduating law school in 2019, O'Brien has worked at GLSP, representing low-income Georgians on a variety of civil legal issues, specializing in domestic violence and kinship care cases. O'Brien is active on GLSP's Race Equity Team and chairs the Race Equity Training & Engagement Committee. From 2022 to 2023, O'Brien was an inaugural National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA) Race Equity Institute Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (REI-DEI) fellow. She is a 2024 recipient of the Honorable Stephen Goss Memorial Scholarship from the 40th annual Family Law Institute and a 2024 graduate of the State Bar of Georgia Young Lawyers Division (YLD) Leadership Academy. She currently serves as co-chair of the YLD Community Service Projects Committee. In addition to the State Bar of Georgia, O'Brien is a member of the Atlanta Bar Association and the Georgia Association for Women Lawyers (GAWL), where she serves on the Mentoring and Communications committees.