2024 NLADA Annual Conference

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 Aministration 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.