Together Delaware’s three civil legal aid agencies—Community Legal Aid Society, Inc. (CLASI), Delaware Volunteer Legal Services (DVLS), and Legal Services Corporation of Delaware (LSCD)—handle almost 8,000 cases a year, serving over 18,000 Delawareans. The vast majority of our cases involve helping individuals and their families stay housed, fed, and safe from domestic violence. The housing cases make intuitive sense to most people—by representing tenants facing eviction in landlord-tenant court, we can prevent homelessness. Similarly, most people seem to be aware of our significant presence in Family Court, helping survivors of domestic violence obtain civil protective orders and related orders that help secure their independence and safety, like child support, custody, or visitation. But what about keeping people fed—how do we help people with that? At LSCD, it means helping them obtain unemployment compensation, which may be the only source of income an individual has to feed themselves or their family. At CLASI, it means helping people in need to access SNAP (formerly Food Stamps), Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, or Social Security Disability Insurance benefits, just to name a few.
These individual cases are undoubtedly the heart and soul of our work, and they help thousands of people each year. They keep us connected to our client communities, immerse us in our clients’ lives, and help us track patterns across client communities to understand what systemic issues are adversely impacting people in our state. This in turn leads to the work that we don’t always have a chance to talk about with our supporters: the systemic advocacy that we do.
Informed by the challenges our individual clients face, our broader advocacy work allows us to leverage our resources to help many more vulnerable and marginalized Delawareans than we otherwise could on a case-by-case basis. Our systemic work involves advocacy to change policies, regulations, and laws that negatively affect our clients and their communities. We employ a range of strategies in this work, including impact litigation, legislative and administrative advocacy, and community legal education.
At CLASI, we have a rich and long history of achieving success in meaningful systemic advocacy that has improved the lives of tens of thousands across Delaware. In one recent example, due to the skillful, persistent advocacy over several years by CLASI attorney Richard Morse, the ACLU of Delaware, and our colleagues at Arnold & Porter, we achieved significant improvements to the public-school funding system that will benefit thousands of disadvantaged Delaware children for decades to come. We reached an agreement that will provide approximately $89 million per year in additional state funding to support low-income children, English language learners, and students with disabilities. The counties will reassess taxable properties, increasing local funding for public schools by 10% in every school district that wishes to accept the money. Schools serving Delaware’s most vulnerable children will now receive more equitable funding, helping to improve educational outcomes and opportunities for all students.
Examples of the many systemic advocacy wins CLASI has achieved over the years include:
- Increasing procedural rights for parents facing termination of parental rights (1970’s);
- Challenging prison overcrowding (1970’s);
- Forcing the Wilmington Housing Authority to remove lead paint from its housing stock (1980’s);
- Enhancing due process rights for public benefit recipients (1980’s and 1990’s);
- Establishing and protecting the integrity of rent control in manufactured housing communities (2000’s);
- Overhauling the state’s solitary confinement system and increasing therapeutic and behavioral services for inmates with mental illness (2010’s);
- Creating a right to representation in evictions for low-income tenants (2020’s);
- Helping lead a coalition that won passage of paid family and medical leave legislation in Delaware (2020’s);
- Operating and steadily expanding a statewide Medical-Legal Partnership program, the first in the country to partner directly with a state public health department to improve health outcomes (present and ongoing); and
- Leading legislative and policy advocacy efforts to improve the Protection from Abuse and Family Court systems for domestic violence survivors (2020’s and ongoing).
In Delaware, we are fortunate to have supporters through the Combined Campaign for Justice who value all the work we do. They support the pro bono work expertly guided by DVLS, the thousands of clients helped in housing and consumer cases by LSCD, and the variety of individual and systemic advocacy work CLASI conducts. Together, we all benefit from a vibrant, vital legal aid system that is over 75 years old and provides life-impacting legal assistance to vulnerable community members throughout the state.
Daniel G. Atkins, Esq.
Executive Director
Community Legal Aid Society, Inc.
