The need behind the Promise of Justice Campaign
In 2005, the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) published a study that found a “major gap between the legal needs of low-income people and the legal help that they receive.”* Closing this gap, LSC recommended, would require at least one legal aid attorney for every 5,000 low-income people. The study called this ratio the minimum standard of access.
The State of Arkansas is not even close to this minimum standard of access. Here there are 12,250 low-income people for each legal aid attorney. To achieve the minimum standard of access, Arkansas’s legal aid providers need to hire 67 more attorneys, plus more support staff and infrastructure. In other words, our legal aid organizations need another $6.4 million annually.
In an attempt to narrow the gap between legal needs and legal aid, the Arkansas Access to Justice Commission teamed up with Arkansas’s legal aid organizations to conduct the 2009 Promise of Justice Campaign. This campaign raised $300,000 for the two legal aid providers in our state: the Center for Arkansas Legal Services (CALS) and Legal Aid of Arkansas (LAA).
Together, CALS and LAA have 40 attorneys in 14 offices reaching into every area of the state. But the efforts of CALS and LAA are limited because of a lack of resources.
* Legal Services Corporation, Documenting the Justice Gap in America: The Current Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-Income Americans (September 2005): p. 1. http://www.lsc.gov/justicegap.pdf (accessed April 29, 2010)
