Proving that the home you just lost in a hurricane is yours. Fighting an eviction notice from a landlord who still hasn’t fixed the mold in your bathroom while also raising your rent. Changing the status of your discharge from the armed services to qualify for benefits you’re owed.
All of these issues have three things in common: First, each is a legal issue, and as such, having access to an attorney could make the difference between sinking deeper into poverty or even homelessness and being able to recover or get by. The second is that, if you’re a lower-income American, it’s virtually impossible to get the legal aid you need. Third, thanks to misconceptions about civil legal aid, vanishingly few philanthropic funders support legal aid nonprofits.
Fortunately, this third fact is changing as an increasing number of funders realize that access to justice is tightly intertwined with core issues from homelessness to public health. But funding for civil legal aid still trails far behind government support for this work — even as government funding itself falls far short of the need. As a result, philanthropic funders have an opportunity to make a significant impact on the lack of access to justice in the U.S., and by doing so, make an even greater difference to many of the core missions the philanthrosphere is working to address.
The justice gap meets the funding gap
In 2022, the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), the nation’s largest provider of funding for legal aid services, reported that 74% of low-income households had experienced one or more civil legal problems in the past year. More than half said that those problems had “substantially impacted their lives,” with consequences ranging from their finances to their mental and physical health and safety. Despite the stakes, the study found that 92% of low-income Americans either received no help at all or not enough legal help to deal with these issues. In 2023, the LSC funded roughly 25% of the country’s legal aid providers.
The justice gap exists because, unlike some countries, the United States doesn’t recognize a right to legal aid for civil issues despite the fact that many civil issues can have just as much of a negative impact on individuals and families as being charged with a crime. Some public funding is available via the LSC and other federal and state programs, but it doesn’t begin to meet the need.
LSC-funded legal aid services are supposed to be available to those living below 125% of the federal poverty level, or just $39,000 for a family of four in the contiguous United States. “You can be quite poor and not qualified for civil legal aid funded by the LSC,” said Legal Services Corporation President Ron Flagg.
And even qualifying for help doesn’t mean someone will receive it. According to LSC’s 2022 report, the legal aid nonprofits it funds turn away nearly half, or 49%, of the requests they receive because of a lack of resources. Further, as the U.S. Department of Justice reported in 2023, statistics about the lack of available civil legal aid resources “describe only those below the poverty line” and thus don’t include the “tens of millions of moderate Americans who also cannot afford legal help.”
Flagg said that a lack of available resources is only part of the issue; another is that people aren’t aware of their rights. “There are many, many people who don’t really know they have a legal problem,” he said. “They get a document that says they owe money or they’re being evicted, and they view it as purely a financial problem. They don’t understand that they may have legal rights that could be helpful to them, [and] they don’t know what legal aid is.”
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Individuals’ ignorance about their legal rights is part of the reason for the justice gap. Ignorance also plays into funders’ lack of action to address it. “Quite frankly, there’s no other sector I know of where there’s such an assumption that everybody can get free [help],” said Claire Solot, the cofounder and managing director of the Bigglesworth Family Foundation, which has been making legal services grants since its founding in 2010. Solot is also a cofounder of the San Francisco-based Legal Services Funder Network (LSFN), a one-of-a-kind “multisectorial” funder affinity group whose members include community, corporate, private and law firm foundations. Solot said that roughly half of LSFN’s membership comes from private foundations like Bigglesworth. The common misconception among funders, Solot said, is that legal aid is either being paid for by law firms or that “somewhere, there’s this magic pot of money that’s big enough” to ensure that no one is denied legal services.
In addition to this misconception, which can make it harder to get funders to the table, Solot and Flagg both said that another issue is that people are “sort of skeptical about giving money to lawyers,” as Flagg put it during our interview. This attitude is problematic given that, between crushing student loans and the comparatively low salaries paid to public interest attorneys in the U.S., many lawyers can’t afford to practice public interest law; in fact, in 2023, there was an average of only 2.8 paid legal aid attorneys for every 10,000 U.S. residents living in poverty.
But despite the fact that funding for civil legal aid includes salaries for the attorneys who provide that aid, Solot said, “Let’s get past the fact… It’s for the clients.”
MacKenzie Scott, natural disasters, and ‘non-identical twins’
Given the gap between the available public funding and the need, there is a lot of room in this sector for private foundations looking to make a difference. According to LSC’s “2023 By the Numbers” report, the 131 grantees funded by the agency that year received only 3.6% of their income from private foundation grants.
Fortunately, philanthropic funders and others seem to be waking up to the necessity and opportunity of using legal aid funding to address core issues that might at first seem unrelated. MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving has made 36 grants to nonprofits providing legal services since 2022. In typical Scott style, the grants whose amounts have been disclosed have been pretty hefty, with the smallest at $600,000 and the largest at $3.6 million. The Scott grants showcase the range of issues impacted by legal services. The Alaska Institute for Justice, for example, which received $2 million this year, “advances human rights and equity for immigrant crime victims and asylum seekers, increasing language access, and climate justice work with indigenous communities threatened by severe climate crisis impacts in Alaska.” Other Scott grantees in this sector work in fields including providing access to the courts for incarcerated people, support for LGBTQ individuals, and access to housing and support with issues related to elementary and secondary education. The Legal Services Corporation’s Flagg called the Scott gifts “a godsend,” both because of their size and because of the attention that Scott’s moves attract from other funders.
Yield Giving and the private foundation members of San Francisco’s Legal Services Funder Network aren’t alone. Northern California healthcare conglomerate Kaiser Permanente has a partnership that refers patients to legal aid groups; Legal Services of Northern California, a Kaiser grantee, helped one such patient avoid eviction and repair a leak that was causing mold that exacerbated her daughter’s asthma. Detroit’s Gilbert Family Foundation created a $13 million eviction defense fund in 2022. Earlier this month, in an article in Forbes, an ER doctor and professor of emergency medicine and health policy at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote that providing legal representation is a public health strategy.
Meanwhile, the increase in frequency and severity of our country’s natural disasters has led to more awareness that victims of such disasters need legal aid. “Fifteen years ago, nobody thought of legal aid when it came to responding to natural disasters,” said the LSC’s Flagg. “Now, in the public sector, literally as the winds are still blowing in a hurricane, we’re getting calls from members of Congress saying, ‘Where are you people? How much money do you need?’”
Solot from Legal Services Funder Network said she sees the same thing from private funders. “Every time there is a humanitarian crisis in the world, we tend to get a surge of people” who realize “if we fund legal services, we actually still are funding our core interests,” she said. At the same time, she also thinks that funders are starting to connect the dots more comprehensively outside of the realm of natural disasters. Citing the Kaiser Permanente grant and Forbes article, she said, “When you can get some of those really big players making those statements,” their public stance “will have a really great, sort of, trickle-down” effect on other funders to stop mentally separating legal aid from the areas of their primary focus “and recognize that these are non-identical twins that should really play together nicely.”
Dawn Wolfe covers the impact of philanthropic money on issues including economic and racial justice, LGBTQ+ equality, and women and girls’ issues/abortion rights. She also covers efforts to reform philanthropic practices. She can be reached at: dawnw@insidephilanthropy.com
