Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, Inc. (The)

Our mission is to use the law to make justice a reality for our neighbors who struggle with homelessness and poverty.

Combining community lawyering and advocacy to achieve our clients’ goals, our expert staff and network of volunteer attorneys provide low barrier, comprehensive legal services at intake sites throughout the District of Columbia, helping our clients to access housing, shelter, and life-saving services.

Rooted in the experiences of this client work, we effectively blend system reform efforts, policy advocacy, community education and client engagement to advocate for long term improvements in local and federal programs that serve the low- and no-income community.

At the Legal Clinic, we work to ensure that our clients get access to the most basic of human rights: housing. We’ve had numerous successes and seen clients go from homeless to housed, but in these tough economic times, the path to a stable home is not an easy one to travel.  With our legal assistance, though, clients can move forward on that journey.  We help families and individuals to enforce their right to shelter during frigid temperatures…a very pressing concern with winter just around the corner; to secure a long awaited permanent housing subsidy; to obtain a unit that is accessible to a family member with a disability; and so much more. We help individual women and men to access disability assistance or food stamps, to connect with substance abuse or mental health treatment, or to preserve their current housing and avoid falling into the abyss of homelessness. 

The only way that we can stand with our clients through difficult times is with you by our side. Taking no government funding so that we can be free to challenge the systems with which our clients struggle, the Legal Clinic relies on the generosity of our friends. Your donation is an opportunity to support the important work of the Legal Clinic. It will keep us answering the phones when families call to say they've been denied shelter. It will allow us to travel to the new frontiers of gentrification in the District, to meet with tenant groups who hope to preserve their apartments as affordable housing. It will provide us the opportunity to help prepare a client who wishes to testify at a Council hearing about how budget cuts will hurt her family. And it will permit us to maintain our presence at our seven community intake sites, so that our clients know they can count on us to be by their side, in the places and spaces where they strive daily to overcome the challenges that homelessness presents.

Read more about our work through our blog:

http://www.legalclinic.org/blog/