SOUTHERN MINNESOTA REGIONAL LEGAL SERVICES INC

Geographic areas served: Twin Cities and southern Minnesota

Programs: Southern minnesota regional legal services (smrls) was formed over 100 years ago (1909) in st. Paul as a branch of associated charities to provide legal advice and representation to low-income people. In 1977, smrls expanded its services to 32 additional counties in the southern third of the state and to migrant farm workers in minnesota and north dakota. Smrls annually closes over 10,000 critical civil legal cases a year, and opens thousands of more new cases. During the fiscal year ended march 31, 2014, smrls served 8,377 clients. At least 5,906 families and individuals benefit annually from smrls' legal work. An additional 24,110 people benefit from smrls' preventative law and community education work. (see schedule o for additional information) to serve an eligible client population of over 200,000 persons, and in light of declining revenues, smrls now has sufficient resources to employ only about 55 attorneys and 45 non-attorney staff. Smrls currently has offices in st. Paul, mankato, rochester, winona, albert lea, worthington, shakopee, and moorhead, as well as several community law offices. Smrls has gained national recognition for its tradition of sound management and innovative approaches to legal services for low-income people. In 1998, smrls became one of the first legal services programs in the country to adopt written practice standards, recently updated. During 2001-04, smrls' leadership and board engaged in a re-engineering (futures) strategic planning process to determine how to best serve clients during a time that smrls lost 18% of its resources due to federal funding cuts and the poor economy. The program was reorganized along regional lines (southeast, southwest, and metro), a centralized 28-county rural hotline was established, and smrls combined several programs to create the refugee, immigrant, and migrant services (rims) project to address the client access and emerging immgration needs of the growing refugee and immigrant population in southern minnesota. In 2013, the hotline was expanded to serve the entire smlrs area. Smrls continues to be well-served by this new model of delivering services. Smrls pioneered immigration work in minnesota in the early 1970s. Smrls created the immigrant law center of minnesota (ilcm). Smrls and ilcm are the two largest immigration law practitioners in the state. Because of lsc restrictions, smrls spun off ilcm in 1996 to handle cases on which smrls could no longer assist. Smrls' nationally respected comprehensive needs assessment process and its diversity and leadership development work has resulted in a community- based, collaborative law practice. Smrls' current innovations include: (1) rims staff are co-located at the intercultural mutual assistance association in rochester to serve the immigrant population; (2) smrls' 3m/mayo corporate immigration pro bono programs; (3) smrls' programs of client intake and collaboration with battered women's shelters and public officials in all 33 counties; (4) smrls' education law advocacy project (co-located with rims) to assist children of color to remain and succeed in school; (5) smrls' housing equality law project (help) to prevent housing discrimination and enforce fair housing rights; (6) smrls' collaborative housing alliance law office (project halo) that leverages corporate, city, and private law to prevent the condemnation of affordable housing and to repair that housing; (7) smrls' emergency assistance and government benefits program, which enables low-income children and families to receive the income and health benefits they need in crisis situations and to remove barriers to self-sufficiency; (8) smrls' homeless outreach and prevention education program (project hope), which uses staff who have experienced homelessness to work with landlords to encourage them to rent to low-income persons with less-than-perfect rental histories and to use the legal process to prevent evictions and provide other assistance and securing housing; and (9) smrls' senior law programs, which use staff and volunteers to provide outreach, education, legal advice, and legal representation to low-income seniors. Smrls has strong working relationships with statewide local bar associations,lawyers, a bipartisan legislature, business and governmental entities, and client groups. Through a series of innovative urban and rural programs, over 160 volunteer attorneys donate approximately 4,400 hours of case representation time in 2014 through smrls' volunteer attorney programs.