VISTA opportunity with legal services program

Spring 2008

California's Senior Legal Hotline (SLH) is a host for two AmeriCorps VISTA members. The first ones began in 2006, the current two began in 2007, and we have two more positions open for July and August 2008. We are now actively seeking candidates for those slots. Deadlines to finalize the selection are mid-May and -June, respectively.

SLH has also been approved as a host through a special VISTA program focused on technology - see http://ctcvista.org. For this program, which starts in July, we are seeking someone with advanced computer skills to help us with a number of projects.

Both programs involve a one-year, full-time commitment. People from age 18 up can join, but most typically, participants are college grads. We are requiring that and have set a minimum age of 21 for working at SLH. For our regular VISTAs, we are looking particularly for people who are likely headed toward law school and thinking about careers with public interest agencies. Law grads are especially welcome too, or perhaps a law student who wants to take a year off mid-study. And some VISTA participants do it as a mid-career break or even after retirement.

The purpose of the VISTA program is to provide capacity building services to nonprofit anti-poverty organizations -- not direct services, though participants can be trained to do that if it helps with their other assignments, such as recruiting and supervising volunteers, for instance.

Participants receive a "living allowance" of $909 a month. They also have health insurance, sick leave, some personal leave, relocation expenses if they come from out of town, child care assistance if applicable. They can get food stamps if they qualify otherwise. Most student loans can be deferred while they're with the program. Expenses such as work-related travel are reimbursed (by us). And if they complete the year successfully, they get $4,725 toward future educational expenses or past student loans, or a $1,200 stipend. They're not allowed to work at other jobs or go to school (with some job-related exceptions) during the year.

Everything anyone would want to know about the program in general is at www.americorps.gov. Make sure you look at the VISTA section. SLH's information can be found by searching there, but below is a slightly abbreviated version of our agency description and a list of the types of things a VISTA would do:

Senior Legal Hotline gives free legal help to California's seniors, mostly by phone, and conducts educational and other related projects. We're an innovative, friendly office - and need creative help to build capacity and conduct outreach.

SLH's mission is to help seniors prevent and overcome poverty by avoiding exploitation and fighting elder abuse, and by gaining key tools to achieve and maintain maximum independence, health, economic security and social productivity.

We're emphatically not a referral service: While we help clients get connected when they need more than we can provide, such as litigation, our main thrust is to deal with the issues presented and work on solving problems. A "case" may involve no more than 10 minutes of valuable phone advice (on almost any legal issue) followed by mailing of relevant materials; but it

also may involve tens of hours of research, document review, negotiation and advocacy.

While part of a traditional legal aid agency, SLH operates autonomously, facing the challenges of growth to serve California's immense population and finding ways to reach especially the poorest seniors and those facing other special challenges such as disability, isolation, poor English or neglect and abuse.

SLH handled about 10,000 individual cases each in 2005 and in 2006, but capacity needs to go even higher. Our staff attorneys, paralegals and support people are experienced, dedicated and spirited; we hope to add more as funding allows - a chronic challenge. Tens of volunteers are an amazing mix of retired attorneys and paralegals, law students, social workers and others - we'll be recruiting more and need help training and integrating them into the operation.

As we enlarge capacity, we need to focus on outreach to target populations and on further improvements to our technology and other systems to give advocates better access to information about legal issues and other community resources. We need to forge and maintain relationships with partner agencies. We are also itching to undertake new educational campaigns to help seniors prevent problems and other projects to help them find better solutions more quickly - for instance, a pilot mediation program just getting started as part of SLH.

VISTA members may take responsibility for many of the following, commensurate with skills and interests:

Recruit, train and supervise volunteer advocates, interns and interpreters, developing permanent systems that will be applied long into the future. Law students or graduates may also undergo advocate training to help with substantive training and supervision of advocates.

Create a sophisticated Intranet, with several levels of privacy protection, to give advocates quick access to substantive legal information and useful community resources, with accurate descriptions of their work, functioning and direct contacts. (Tech skills are a major plus here.)

Revamp SLH's public web site for better access and user friendliness.

Create new, improved outreach materials - printed and for broadcast.

Represent SLH in community coalitions and at events; staff info tables; make presentations.

Develop plans and conduct outreach in Southern Calif., still a relatively new and underserved region for SLH, and statewide to seniors with limited English and to others through faith communities. (Foreign language fluency highly valued)

Create written and audio-visual materials for preventive education campaigns.

Help maintain regular communications with key partners possibly create an advisory council.

Research funding sources, write grant proposals and reports.

Develop a management and quality control system to exploit new technology that enables the use of volunteer advocates from remote locations.

A CTC VISTA would help improve the case management system, troubleshoot and mentor users on our data and phone networks, develop a sophisticated intranet to make huge amounts of information more readily available to advocates and revamp our public web site.

We envision as an ideal candidate someone who has attended, plans to attend or is at least seriously considering law school, is drawn toward a career in public interest work and wants to be immersed in the field for a year. S/he is smart, energetic, creative, well-organized, highly computer literate -- maybe even with some significant programming and web design skills -- has great writing and public speaking ability, and is really good at taking on projects and following through, with the right balance between independent initiative and consulting with supervisors. A particular interest in work with seniors and fluency in another language would be wonderful too.

Please get in touch if you'd like to learn more about the opportunity and, if feasible, arrange for a visit. Contact: David Mandel, supervising attorney, dmandel@lsnc.net.