Fight poverty with justice. Support legal services.
Introducing the Justice for All Campaign
Seizing the moment of our 50th anniversary in 2016, Community Legal Services (CLS) is strengthening our unique model by launching a new, high-impact giving initiative focused on individuals. The Justice for All Campaign is a complement to the Bar Campaign, our annual appeal to law firms. Justice for All engages people in and beyond the legal community to protect and enhance our capacity to overcome legal problems that keep people in poverty. CLS is taking this bold step now to add a channel for raising private funds. Individuals are invited to become Sustaining Donors by committing their support for multiple years. CLS is delighted to offer special recognition to these loyal benefactors.
Join us and fight poverty through access to justice. When you support excellent legal services, you change someone’s life. Now and for the future, you can fight poverty, in three powerful ways that level the playing field for low-income families:
- Excellent individual representation
- Effective impact litigation
- Sophisticated policy advocacy
By supporting CLS attorneys as they carry out the work of our nationally-recognized program, you are making a crucial difference for people in their darkest hours, when they have no one else to speak for them and nowhere else to turn. Your gift can prevent homelessness, clear a path to employment, and help children and families to thrive. Your sustaining gift keeps the beacon of hope and help shining into the future.
Why CLS Needs You
More than a quarter of all families in Philadelphia are living in poverty and only a small fraction has access to legal help when they need it. Legal cases are often turning points in poor families’ lives – will they be evicted and end up in a shelter, or will they have the stability of a home? Will they have health insurance to pay for the care they need, or will their condition become life-threatening without treatment? When you help to keep a family in their home, access income or health insurance, or remove barriers to education and employment, you are truly changing someone’s life. This is the work CLS does every day.
While the need for effective legal services is immense, traditional funding sources continue to shrink. As a result, we are turning away people who need our help: families we could successfully prevent from being evicted; senior citizens we could protect from consumer scams;; children who could be reunited with parents; stolen wages that could be recovered for the working poor; and support that could be obtained for children and vulnerable adults with disabilities.
What Makes CLS Different
Community Legal Services is recognized nationally as one of the best legal services programs in the country. We are unique in the large number of clients we serve, the broad scope of services we provide, and the combination of strategies we employ, which we call our Three-Pronged Model. The bedrock of our work is aggressive individual representation: we serve more than 11,000 individual clients per year, by far the most of any provider in Philadelphia. Based on a deep understanding of the facts in each case, CLS’ lawyers identify systemic problems that keep our clients in poverty and find creative solutions. Completing our model, CLS executes impact litigation and sophisticated policy advocacy that benefits thousands of low-income people in Philadelphia, across Pennsylvania and even nationwide. Poor clients seeking legal help often face multiple legal issues; because we represent clients across a broad spectrum of issues, we can be highly effective in changing lives.
Working with related organizations amplifies the effect of our legal work, and we maintain close relationships with over 200 local and national organizations. CLS is a sought-after partner in groundbreaking collaborative efforts that have brought legal aid to people well beyond our offices. We multiply our impact by providing expertise, technical support and education for other professionals who also serve low-income people, and creating proven models that can be implemented by other organizations.
Our Vision: Access to Justice for All
The Justice for All Campaign is for everyone, attorneys and non-attorneys alike, who shares our vision of fighting poverty through increased access to justice. With your help, we can go forward, and farther, together. Please make your commitment today with a recurring or one-time gift here or contact Caitlin Brown for more information at cbrown@clsphila.org
