A Year-End Message to LSC-Funded Programs

A Year-End Message to LSC-Funded Programs
from Chairman John Levi & President Jim Sandman

December 20, 2012

As 2012 draws to a close, we want to take this opportunity to thank you and all of the LSC-funded programs for extending yourselves as you have throughout this challenging year.

We know that you have been faced with spiraling demand while at the same time many of you have had to cope with reduced resources, but somehow you have once again displayed incredible resourcefulness and commitment in providing high-quality legal services to the most vulnerable of our fellow citizens.

As you know, LSC has launched a number of initiatives this year that we hope will assist you in the coming months and years.

The national Pro Bono Task Force report, which you all have seen, recommends ways to expand the ranks of lawyers who are willing to do pro bono work and offers guidance on how to better match those lawyers with the growing unmet need.

So many folks have raised their hands to help in this effort, and we are optimistic that we will see many exciting developments as we move forward with implementing these recommendations in consultation with you.

LSC’s technology summit, which began in June, will hold its concluding meeting in a few weeks in Jacksonville. Many of the technological innovations you use to expand your reach grew out of LSC’s first technology summit 1998, and we are confident that more breakthroughs will come from the current summit.

Thanks to the generosity of the Public Welfare Foundation, LSC will use a substantial grant received this year for a project designed to improve the Corporation’s data collection and reporting and to bolster grantees’ own efforts to collect and use data.

We have also worked hard throughout the year to call attention to the crisis in civil legal assistance with forums of state supreme court chief justices and other legal experts, first at the White House, then at our quarterly Board meetings in Ann Arbor and Durham, and again next month in New Orleans.    

We are very grateful to all of you, the real heroes of the civil justice system.

Congratulations again on the invaluable work you are doing in helping to preserve a fundamental pillar of our democracy—equal access to justice.