Q & A with
Jonathan Smith

Executive Director, Legal Aid Society
of the District of Columbia

Fourth in a series on the 2009 Exponent Award recipients

Q: What does Legal Aid Society do and how have you grown as an organization since you came on board as executive director?

A:  Legal Aid is a law firm for people who cannot afford a lawyer. We provide legal assistance to individuals and communities living in poverty in the areas of domestic violence, custody, child support, public benefits, housing, and consumer law. Since 2005, we have nearly doubled in size. We now have 32 full-time paid staff, 23 of whom are lawyers, as well as five full-time lawyer volunteers. 

Q: What observations have you made over the course of the economic downturn that have impacted the way you do business?

A:  Communities living in poverty have been hard hit by the recession. Unemployment has risen dramatically, especially in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, and the need for income and other supports has increased. At the same time, the government is experiencing a budget crisis and social services agencies are starved for resources. Since the beginning of the recession we have see both an increase in demand for services and the emergence of new issues.To respond to the need, we have:

• Formed a consumer practice unit with two lawyers that help low-income homeowners facing foreclosure or mortgage fraud.
• Undertook an initiative to assist tenants at risk for eviction because their landlord lost the property to foreclosure.

• Participated in advocacy efforts to strengthen the District’s public benefits programs and protect them from budget cuts.

Unfortunately, we have also seen a reduction in our funding. During 2009, we imposed a hiring freeze and reduced employee benefits in order to control costs. Over the course of the year, we lost attorneys and other staff, leaving us with fewer resources to meet the increased needs. It has been humbling to see what Legal Aid staff members have accomplished under increasingly challenging circumstances. Nevertheless, we still turn away far more clients than we like, knowing that they will not be helped elsewhere and forced to try and resolve their dispute on their own. This year we’ve lifted the hiring freeze and authorized the use of reserve funds to maintain services.

Q: Tell us how your clients are doing, given the state of the economy. What, if anything, has you worried?

A:  For decades, the poverty level has hovered at 20 percent, with the vast majority of people who are poor being women, children, the elderly, people of color, and persons living with disabilities. Poverty has increased with the recession. Job loss in service and construction industries has forced families that were moving up the economic ladder to fall back. The result is uneven across the District. East of the River, unemployment rates have risen to depression-era levels: Ward 8—28.3 percent and Ward 7—19.5 percent. More than four in ten District households with children had at least one period over the last year when they did not have enough money for food. Employment will take a long time to recover and the effects on children and communities may last for decades. The short-term pain of recession could turn into a lifetime of economic inequality.

Q: What’s your process for documenting your success stories? How do you use these stories?

A:  The best way to tell the Legal Aid story is through the impact we have on clients. Justice is a very granular thing. It requires good laws and institutions, but it comes to life for individuals. In order to capture the effect of our work, we collect client stories and keep them in a central story bank. We use these stories to illustrate the need for changes to public policy, when we recruit volunteers and when we raise money. The stories serve not only to help us communicate our message, but hopefully give our clients a voice and a face and break down the myths about people who live in poverty.

Q: You have a blog (Making Justice Real). What are some of the lessons you have learned about managing an institutional blog that you can share with us? What have been the surprises—both positive and challenging—about blogging?

A:  Last summer we started a blog, a Twitter feed, and a Facebook page. We had multiple goals for these new efforts: affect public policy, communicate with supporters, increase our profile and get useful information into the hands of our clients. Shortly after the blog went up, we were engaged in a major effort to save antipoverty programs from funding cuts.The blog became an outlet for policy statements, information about upcoming events and was very helpful for our organizing efforts. It has also been a great tool to talk about successes in litigation and advocacy and to contribute to the debates regarding access to justice and poverty reduction. We try to post at least twice each week, which can sometimes be a challenge. Being new to social media I was surprised at two things: first, that Twitter is a very effective way to communicate and that Facebook is not. 

Q: What do you see as the greatest accomplishments of Legal Aid Society’s team while you’ve been executive director?

A:  Every day I am inspired by the compassion, commitment, intelligence and hard work of every staff member. There is a tremendous loyalty to clients and to mission that is very moving.
The quality of the team has allowed us to make changes that better serve client needs. Those changes include:

• The establishment of three community offices east of the Anacostia River that reduce geographic barriers to access services.
• The creation of an Appellate Advocacy Project to have a greater impact on the development of the law.
• A partnership with other legal services providers and the Court to create an office in the Superior Court to provide representation to tenants.
• Expansion of our priorities to include consumer law
• Initiatives to become linguistically accessible to limited English speakers
• A robust public policy practice that has influenced regulations, Court, and agency practices and legislation
• A culture of excellence that has led to consistently high quality representation on a broad range of cases.

Q: How do you engage and harness so much volunteer interest from law firms and law students?

A:  Since its founding in 1932, Legal Aid has relied heavily on pro bono lawyers to serve our clients. Legal Aid has a fantastic volunteer coordinator in Jodi Feldman, who makes sure that each volunteer project is a match between the interests of the volunteer and the needs of Legal Aid.  Lawyers and law students participate in the program in a broad range of ways.Last year the value of volunteer services exceeded $6 million. We strongly believe that the obligation to ensure that everyone has meaningful access to justice is shared by every member of the bar.

Q: What do you hope to do with the Exponent Award funding?

Nonprofits' Role in the Upcoming Census

By  Karen FitzGerald

Meyer Foundation Program Officer

In a little more than a month, the US Census Bureau will mail Census questionnaires to more than 110 million households across the country. Information collected during the 2010 Census will be used to allocate more than $400 billion in federal, state, and local government funding over the next ten years. It will be used to draw Congressional and state voting districts. Government and the private sector also rely on Census data to help decide where to build new hospitals, roads, transit, schools, and other major infrastructure projects.

With just ten questions, participating in the Census is easy.  And because strict rules keep individual answers to Census questions confidential, participating in the Census is also safe. Nevertheless, some groups – such as children living in poverty and residents of low-income communities – tend to be undercounted in each decennial Census. More than one-third of DC residents live in areas categorized by the Census Bureau as hard to count. Neighborhoods in suburban Maryland and Northern Virginia with high concentrations of recent immigrants also have the potential to be undercounted this year. With the average federal expenditure based on Census data at nearly $1,500 per person counted each year, an undercount of just one percent would lead to more than $700 million in federal funds lost to our region over the next decade.

Community-based nonprofit organizations have an essential role to play in ensuring a fair and accurate count in the 2010 Census. As trusted messengers in many of these  hard-to-count communities, nonprofits are uniquely positioned to explain the importance of the Census to the individuals and families they serve, as well as to encourage them to complete the Census questionnaire when it lands in their mailboxes in mid-March. 

To help ensure that everyone is counted in this Census, nonprofits can do everything from distributing literature about the Census to applying to serve as a Census Community Questionnaire Assistance Center. For more information about the important role for nonprofits in ensuring a fair and accurate count in the 2010 Census, please visit www.nonprofitscount.org, a project of the Nonprofit Voter Engagement Project. To link to Census activities in your community, please contact your local Complete Count Committee: 

Montgomery County

Bruce Adams

Bruce.adams@montgomerycountymd.gov

Prince George’s County

Cheryl Harrington

Cheryl.harrington@mncppc.org

Fairfax County

Cora Sandoval Foley

corafoleyfanhsnova@hotmail.com.

Prince William County

Phyllis Aggrey

paggrey@pwcgov.org

Alexandria City

Ralph Rosenbaum

(703) 746-3859

District of Columbia

Maurice Henderson

(202) 442-8822

Arlington County

Elizabeth Rodgers

Census2010@arlingtonva.us