Adopt A Neighborhood Project (Law firms make great neighbors!)

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

Back in February, the Kansas City Business Journal ran a cover story about the work that the Stinson Leonard Street law firm is doing in the Marlborough Neighborhood.

About five years ago, Stinson adopted the low-income neighborhood in southeastern Kansas City, which is part of the Center School District. By working together, neighborhood leaders, local non-for-profits, the City and Stinson attorneys, with the support of Legal Aid, have achieved many remarkable successes in the neighborhood. Abandoned houses have been repaired and are now high quality housing. There is now a medical clinic in the neighborhood. The neighborhood is the home of a new grocery store (for many years the neighborhood had been a food desert. The only places people living in the neighborhood could buy “groceries” were gas stations and convenience stores).

The project has not only been a success for the community, it’s had great benefits for the firm as well. It has allowed new attorneys excellent training opportunities and created a signature project for the firm’s Kansas City office that everyone can be proud of.

The Bryan Cave firm for years has done a similar project addressing abandoned properties in the Ivanhoe neighborhood. Husch Blackwell has also recently adopted the Mannheim neighborhood.

There are, however, scores of other neighborhoods that need similar help and attorneys have the power to make a tremendous difference in these neighborhoods.  If your firm is interested in finding out how to get involved, please give me a call at (816)474-1413 x5224.

Without a home, your whole life can shatter...

By Jane Worley, Supervising Attorney - Central Office Housing Plus 

Every person we represent on the Housing Plus Team has one thing in common. They are asking for help with one of the basic needs for human beings—shelter.

Sometimes they have a home, but a landlord or a government agency has decided they have broken the rules. Sometimes the rules actually were broken, but it is for circumstances beyond their control, such as an abusive ex-partner who won’t let a locked door keep them from their target. There may be no money for rent or utilities because the car needed to get to work breaks down or your child needs new school items in September. Some of our clients cannot get into subsidized housing to relieve a rent burden of 60 to 80% of their take home income because they have an old eviction or there just isn’t anything available.

Without a home, your whole life can shatter in no time at all.

Here is one example of a client’s problem which we were able to help him resolve:

Jerry has an anxiety disorder which causes him to lash out at when anyone who comes into his apartment. He complained frequently to the manager about maintenance coming into his unit, taking his things or moving or breaking things. He said he never got notice that maintenance was coming. His landlord responded by telling him he was a nuisance and filing for eviction. A Legal Aid Housing Plus attorney asked for a reasonable accommodation of his disability to which the landlord did not respond. Jerry’s Legal Aid attorney then filed a Fair Housing Complaint with HUD, resulting in a Conciliation Agreement allowing him to stay if he provided the landlord with an alternative person with whom to discuss problems relating to maintenance.

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Legal Aid of Western Missouri's housing advocates provide a broad array of legal services, focusing primarily on public housing and Section 8 housing. Our housing counselors regularly provide advice or representation to help our clients avoid wrongful evictions and improper rent calculations. Landlord/tenant disputes and uninhabitable housing conditions are other legal challenges facing our clients. Housing advocates also assist people who are disabled with accessibility issues, and we help other clients with disputes over eligibility for public and subsidized housing.

Mental Health Court Turns Lives Around

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

Joe was a homeless gentleman who kept being picked up for trespassing at Crown Center, where he would sleep in a box on a corner in that area. Joe was not medication compliant and had a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He was not engaged with any community-based behavioral health center except to go to Swope Health Services once a week to take a shower.  

A Crisis Intervention Team officer came to court to let the Mental Health Court team know that he felt Joe was decompensating. Outreach at Swope made contact with Joe and after several months of working with him on an intensive level, Joe was admitted to the Mental Health Court program. He graduated and now has stable housing, is medication compliant, has a case manager and has not had police contact since August 2012.

Our staff here at Legal Aid are always looking for the root cause of our clients’ legal problems and for ways we can solve related community problems. One shining example of this work is Mental Health Court in Kansas City.

Many of the defendants in Municipal Court in Kansas City have serious mental health problems that cause them to be homeless and often lead them to violate trespassing and other laws. It used to be that these defendants were in a constant cycle of going in and out of jail, while no one paid any attention to the real cause of the problem. While their mental health problem remained untreated the likelihood of them being able to stay out of jail was remote.

Working with the judges, court administration, prosecutors, mental health providers, the superintendent of the City jail and many others, Legal Aid collaborated to create one of the first Mental Health Court’s in the country. The Court now gives offenders with serious mental health problems the opportunity to go to treatment, rather than going to jail. To graduate from Mental Health Court participants have to stay on their medications, go to regular counseling sessions and not have any new charges filed against them for at least six months. If they graduate, the original charges that brought them into Court are dropped.

The results of the project are fantastic. Today, Mental Health Court has a 56% graduation rate and 89% of the detainees who graduate commit no further violations in the year after their release. Not only does this program improve safety in Kansas City, it also improves the quality of life for the defendants—allowing them to get their mental health issues under control and lead stable lives. Legal Aid has been similarly collaborative for Veterans Treatment Court and Drug Court. 

Veterans Relief Project

By Maura Weber – Project Director

In October 2013 I was proud to be named the first project director of Legal Aid’s Veterans Relief Project. There are an estimated 1,400 homeless veterans in the Kansas City metro area. Many of these Veterans have legal problems impeding their ability to obtain or maintain stable housing. The Veterans Relief Project began with the idea that if we could help veterans overcome the legal barriers to stable housing, we can help the community get one step closer to ending veteran homelessness in the Kansas City area.

The majority of my clients are referrals from community partners. We work closely with the Kansas City VA Medical Center, the Salvation Army Kansas City, Catholic Charities of Kansas City – St. Joseph, and reStart, Inc. to identify veterans who are in need of legal assistance. In the year since I started working as project director I have assisted over sixty veterans with various legal problems. I also attend various community outreach and Stand Down events to meet with Veterans directly.

Ted served in the National Guard for five years. Unfortunately, his service did not qualify him to receive medical care through the Department of Veterans Affairs. He has ongoing mental health problems, some of which stemmed from being homeless for over 20 years. Ted was unable to obtain medical treatment because of his lack of insurance and inability to go to a VA Medical Center. Legal Aid’s Veterans Relief Project helped him obtain MO HealthNet for the Aged, Blind, and Disabled. He is now receiving regular care, both mental and physical. The community partner who referred Ted to the Veteran Relief Project also helped Ted obtain stable housing, so he is now able to have a safe place to live in addition to obtaining important medical care.

Frank was referred to Legal Aid Veteran Relief Project by a community partner. His child support allotment was unduly high, making it difficult for him to afford rent and utilities in addition to his child support payments. Frank lost his job a year ago and had been unsuccessful finding a new one. Legal Aid represented Frank in court and reduced his monthly child support payments by more than half, which in turn helped him afford his monthly cost of living.

First Lady Michelle Obama, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs recently announced the creation of the Mayors Challenge to End Veteran Homelessness. Kansas City Mayor Sly James has committed to this program and the goal of ending Veteran Homelessness in the Kansas City community by 2015. I am proud to support this goal and the area veterans.

The Changing Nature of the Legal Profession

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

At the 40th Anniversary of the creation of the Legal Services Corporation, there were lots of speeches by impressive dignitaries. There were also lots of impressive and surprising facts bandied around about the changing nature of the legal profession.

Here are a number of noteworthy facts and statistics that I came away with and which might be of interest to you. I have not done any confirmation of these, but can only tell you that they come from credible sources:

--The cost of litigation is resulting in alternative dispute resolution processes that are outside of the legal system. For example, in 2013, e-Bay resolved 6 million on-line disputes without the assistance of any attorney;

--In 2013, there were 335,000 cases brought in federal court in which the court provided an interpreter for a party or a witness who did not speak English;

--Washington State is considering issuing limited licenses to practice law, that would allow students to graduate from law school in substantially less time if they were only going to focus their practice on a specific type of work (for example, divorces on municipal court cases);

--New York State now allows law students to skip their final term of law school and take the bar exam in February, if they spend their final term working for a not-for-profit organization;

-- Justice Scalia at the conference said: "Access to justice is the most fundamental American ideal."

--The United Kingdom has de-regulated law. They now allow non-lawyers to own law firms;

--According to a 10-year Harvard study, the average new attorney changed jobs roughly 4 times between 2002 and 2012; 

--In half of the cases filed in the 7th Circuit in 2013 at least one party was not represented by counsel;

--In 90% of the divorce cases filed in Connecticut in 2013 at least one party was not represented by counsel;

--In 1978, federal funding for legal aid programs nationally was $205 million. That equates to $747 million in funding in 2014 dollars, when adjusted for inflation. That is more than twice the current level of federal funding for the legal aid programs’ work;

--Discretionary funding in the federal budget (which is where Legal Aid funding comes from) is now about one-third of the budget. In 2024, it’s estimated the discretionary funding will account for only 15% of the budget;

--In 1994, the largest 200 law firms in the country did about 900,000 of pro bono work. In 2013, they did over 5 million hours of pro bono work.

--Attorneys in Texas in 2013 did 2.5 million hours of pro bono work.

LSC's 40th Anniversary Kick-Off Conference

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

For the last three days, I have had the good fortune to be the guest, along with all of the other legal aid program directors, of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) at the 40th anniversary of LSC in Washington, D.C.

Guest speakers included Attorney General Eric Holder, Vice President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who was one of the first presidents of the Legal Service Corporation Board), Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Antonin Scalia, as well as the deans of Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Duke law schools. Every living U.S. President sent a congratulatory letter.

From all, the essential underlying message was the same: the work of the legal aid programs is critical to the justice system and to the very success of the country as a whole. As Justice Scalia, of all people, put it: "Access to justice is the most fundamental American ideal."

We were repeatedly thanked profusely for our work, but those thanks really belong to the people who do the work on the front lines every day. So, to everyone who works for the cause-- attorneys, paralegals, secretaries, intake staff, volunteers and even the folks in administration-- please know that at the highest levels of government and the judiciary in our country, your work is known, understood and appreciated.  

And you should also know that, almost uniformly among the speakers we heard, there was a clear recognition that the work of the legal aid programs is grossly underfunded. 

There are a lot of good people at the Legal Services Corporation, the ABA, the Justice Department and the NLADA working hard to translate the appreciation we heard into increased support for our work. 

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There were lots of amazing facts and statistics bandied about at the conference. Later this week, I hope to get out another post with some of the more memorable ones.

Getting Missourians Access to Healthcare

by Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

I’m excited to report, albeit belatedly, about the work that Stacy Schaub and others have been doing on the Legal Aid Family Support Division Work Group in regard to problems the State of Missouri has been having in processing Medicaid applications. Other members of the Work Group include: Billie Orr, Alicia Johnson, Lisa Gentleman, Jeffiner Thompson, Emily DeStefano and Abbie Rothermich.

In the last year, the State has made major funding cuts and office reorganization in the Family Support Division (known as the FSD), which processes applications for public benefits, including Medicaid, Food Stamps, and Temporary Assistance. 

Medicaid provides health insurance for low-income Missourians who are permanently and totally disabled and, because of their disability, are not capable of gainful employment. It also pays for or subsidizes health insurance for children in low to moderate income families. For thousands of low-income Missourians, Medicaid is their only viable means of accessing long-term, pro-active medical care and the prescription medications they need to bring the pain and other aspects of their maladies under control.

The FSD funding cuts and reorganization have meant that for many Medicaid applicants there is no one to talk to from the State about questions they have on their applications and no one even to give them a receipt when they submit required documentation supporting their applications. We have had many situations in which we have actually faxed in information, like an income verification to the FSD for a client only to have the FSD send the client a letter several weeks later, saying that their application has been denied because they did not provide the FSD with the birth certificate.

The FSD also has gotten much slower in processing applications for Medicaid. So, now it can take several months to get a decision back from FSD, which is a long time to wait when you have a serious medical issue. 

Because of these obstacles and others, from September 2013 through March 2014, Medicaid enrollment in Missouri dropped 3.9% (approximately 33,800 people, one of the largest drops in Medicaid enrollment in the country. While this saves the State and the federal government money in the short-term, it greatly damages the health of the people who need Medicaid and leads to major costs for the hospitals that treat people who are wrongly denied Medicaid when they have catastrophic health crises as a result of not receiving the care they need.

Stacy Schaub, who is the Supervisor of Legal Aid’s Public Benefits Team in our central office, is part of a team of Legal Aid attorneys and other staff who are strategizing on how to respond to problems in the FSD’s processing of Medicaid applications and the processing of other public benefits. 

In early August, the Missouri HealthNet Oversight Committee held a meeting in Jefferson City on the status of Missouri’s Medicaid system. At the meeting, FSD leadership testified that, although there were problems that needed to be addressed, FSD had adequate funding and staffing to handle them. Stacy provided powerful testimony at the meeting bringing to light the numerous problems that the FSD is having.

I’m very proud of the work that Stacy and the other members of Legal Aid’s FSD Task Force have done on this issue. It’s a major step towards getting lots of Missourians in need the healthcare they need and that, under the law, they deserve.