This session will explore how best to build consensus among stakeholders and legislators to achieve desired legislative objectives using as examples two successful initiatives from South Carolina, creation of a statewide indigent defense system and passage of significant sentencing reform legislation. A state senator who led the way, a senior Judiciary Committee staff attorney, and a key resource from the PEW Center on the States define their respective roles in achieving success and examine similar approaches from other states.
2011 Centennial Conference Sessions
A Legislators Approach to Building Consensus: Case Studies in Creating a Statewide Indigent Defense System and Achieving Sentencing Reform
A True Sea Change: Civil Right to Counsel as an Anti-Poverty Strategy
Can a civil right to counsel be an anti-poverty strategy? If indigent clients gain a right to counsel in basic human needs cases, what opportunities exist, through volume litigation and appellate advocacy, for effecting systemic procedural and substantive change to povertys the causes and effects?
Access Friendly E-Filing: Current Status and Lessons from the Trenches
Deploying access-friendly e-filing is complex from a political, policy and technical point of view, but it is critical to ensure access to justice in the coming tech era. In this session participants will hear from those involved in these efforts on the latest e-filing issues, developments, lessons learned, and suggested best practices, both state and federal. Find out why you cannot leave these efforts to others or your clients may be left out.
Administrative Law: A New Frontier for Access
This session will discuss how administrative agencies and administrative courts are improving access through training of judges, adopting innovative technologies, simplifying procedures and working with pro bono assistance programs. Participants will also learn how an access hostile Model State Administrative Procedure Act already approved by the Commission on Uniform Laws threatens to impose new barriers to access in administrative litigation. The session will discuss how Access Commissions are helping ensure access in this important area.
Answering the Call: Incorporating Mobile Technology into Your Sevices Delivery System
Rethink mobile devices. They do more than interrupt your meetings; they can retool how your program delivers information. Your clients are using mobile technology. Has your program adapted? This session will discuss why mobile matters and show how to incorporate mobile into your delivery systems.
Attorney Retention: Rethinking the Role of Loan Repayment in Retaining Attorney Talent and How Bar Association Partnerships Can Help
Law school indebtedness limits the ability of public service employers to attract and retain qualified attorneys. This workshop will (i) provide an update on the federal LRAP program; (ii) explore how LRAP can be used as a retention tool; and (iii) explore how bar associations can play a role in helping to educate both employers and students on this issue.
Beyond Bean Counting: Using Outcomes Data to Improve Program Advocacy
Different legal aid grant makers require grantees to submit various data to demonstrate program effectiveness and justify funding. For example, the Legal Services Corporation requires grantees to submit Case Services Report (CSR) data. Many grantees believe these numbers do not effectively show the significance and impact of their work. They also find such data of limited value in targeting resources, identifying and meeting clients needs, improving program performance, and developing and maximizing the impact of their advocacy. The Measuring Justice and Engaging Client Communities subcommittees of the Performance Enhancement Committee (PEC) of NLADA has been working on developing innovative ways to measure justice. In this session, hear from LSC and representative legal services providers and clients on how they engage client communities to learn of needs, measure outcomes to strengthen their program quality, better demonstrate the value of their work, and enhance the benefits of their advocacy to their client communities.
Blueprint for Justice: Developing Diverse Board Membership
How much time should an Executive Director spend in building a diverse board? Program leadership needs both the commitment and the ability to make our boards as diverse and effective as possible. What are the best practices for recruiting, training, supporting your board? What are the special challenges to doing so for diverse board members ? both client and attorney?
Building Community Influence and Power: How Sargent Shrivers Legacy Continues to Inform Legal Aid Work Today
Reflecting on Sargent Shrivers legacy and vision, this session explores strategies and tools that todays legal aid lawyers use to help low-income communities assert their power and influence in relation to key policy and systemic issues that affect their lives ? from jobs, health care and taxes to asset building and racial justice.
Building Community Partnerships: How to Work With Your Community to meet the Holistic Needs of Your Clients
The Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (PDS) will discuss its annual Community Reentry and Expungement Summit (Summit), which is an annual collaborative project focused on helping persons with criminal records as well as their families to access information, services, lawyers and the courts to help minimize the consequences and civil punishments of arrest and/or incarceration. For each of the last seven years, this PDS event has served hundreds of D.C. residents by providing on the spot free legal advice and valuable reentry services and information. To do this, PDS brings together public defenders, private defense lawyers, civil legal services lawyers, judges, law students, and the local bar association, government services agencies and community-based service providers for a full day of client-centered activity. This workshop will discuss the effectiveness of the defenders and civil legal services collaborative model and how defenders and civil legal service providers can increase access to justice in their communities through collaboration despite increasing budget woes.
Building Relationships with your Congressional Delegation
Legal service organizations, well-known for their knowledge of issues facing low-income individuals, can provide interesting context and background information for members of Congress. This ongoing relationship-building is important. In this session, participants will learn about best practices in government relations for LSC-funded agencies, hear feedback from Congressional staffers on ways to engage with Congress, learn tactics from other nonprofits who do education work on the Hill, and be empowered to create an educational campaign for a local Congressional delegation.
Collateral Impacts of Re-entry
Although the members of a community come from different backgrounds and are impacted by different life experiences, everyone has a stake in re-entry. Re-entry involves more than just the post-incarceration transition of ex-offenders. Rather, re-entry deals with issues of housing, drug treatment, health, education, employment and many more things. Accordingly, during this session, individuals with diverse perspectives will be engaged in a meaningful discussion on the value of re-entry to the home comers, their families and the community.
Community Lawyering in Support of Social Justice Campaigns
This workshop will explore the role of the legal services lawyer in support of social justice campaigns. We will discuss how lawyers can continue to meet funding requirements while also working with community-based organizations seeking to empower local residents and advance goals of social and economic justice.
Community Listening: Going Beyond Traditional Needs Assessments
This session will detail the community listening process undertaken over the course of a year to identify populations in Minnesota that were significantly underserved and the often unmet legal problems that they encounter. The process which was supported with funds and significant staff support by the Minnesota State Bar Association and the states legal aid programs involved a disciplined effort to go beyond the traditional inquiry methods used in legal needs assessments to interact with low income individuals and the agencies that serve them. The session will describe the process that may serve as a model for similar inquiries in other states. It will also detail the interesting, and perhaps provocative, findings of the study.
Courage: Moving Through Fear Toward Community, Power & Transformation
Charles Chuck Wynder, Jr. is the keynote speaker for this years Client Track. Wynder, formerly Vice-President for Programs and Leadership for NLADA, joins us to share a message about courage. He will lead and facilitate an interactive dialogue aimed at addressing the fundamental value of courage. Courage is developed in relationship with others and helps to equip us to move beyond our fears toward reflection and action. Join us for a community forum intended to grapple with courage in the face of economic uncertainty, political instability, personal challenges and communal hope for change.
Criminal Justice Debt: Strategies for Dealing with a Growing Collateral Consequence
Increasingly, policymakers are attaching new fees to virtually all stages of criminal proceedings. The result is that people being released from prison are often thousands of dollars in debt. This session will discuss recent advocacy strategies for combating the impact of rising fees.
Culture and Communication: Identifying and Overcoming Stereotypes in a Client-Centered Practice
Part 1 will identify how culture, including race, gender, sexual orientation and religion, impact professionals communication with clients. We will explore the difficulty in understanding and relating to different cultures and the role that stereotyping plays in communication. The participants will attempt to walk in their clients shoes in identifying recurring sources of miscommunication.
Cy Pres: A Funding Source to Pursue When Times are Tough
Many programs have seen cy pres revenue increase as other sources have fallen during this economic downturn. If you want to start a cy pres campaign or run a stronger one, this session is for you. Our panelists, who have had significant success with these awards, will share their strategies for developing and implementing a successful campaign and discuss the court rules/ legislation that are helping to increase awards in some states.
Dare to Ask! Sharpen Your Negotiation Skills to Benefit Clients and Yourself
Great leaders are great negotiators. Some people, however, dread negotiation while others find it a fantastically fun adventure. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle. This session is designed to help you as a leader tap into the negotiation skills you already use every day and take them from good to great! The session will review the fundamental elements that professional negotiators use. You will explore ways you can create collaborative conversations to improve your negotiation skills to benefit your individual clients and empower you to be the best negotiator you can be ? both at work and at home.
Daring to Lead: Beyond Financial Accountability to Organizational Sustainability
In Daring to Lead 2011: A National Study of Nonprofit Executive Leadership, CompassPoint Nonprofit Services and the Meyer Foundation challenge nonprofit executives and board members to develop new strategies to strengthen boards even in difficult financial times. In this session, one of the authors of the report, Rick Moyers, will discuss its major findings and explore with panelists from the legal aid community what it means to govern for organizational sustainability.