Community development clinics: what does poverty have to do with them?

• Author: Alvarez, Alicia

1. INTRODUCTION

   This Essay advocates for a more explicit link between the work of community economic development clinics and efforts to eliminate poverty. Community development clinics need to do more than teach students to be good transactional lawyers--rather they must also acknowledge and focus their efforts on the elimination and reduction of poverty. I begin by briefly discussing poverty lawyering and then situate community development in the context of poverty lawyering. I then highlight critiques of the traditional poverty and community development lawyering. I conclude with some thoughts on how better to connect anti-poverty strategies and community development clinics and lawyering, while addressing some of the critiques of community development lawyering.

   I come to community economic development work from the perspective of poverty law, and my goal in focusing on community development is to work with groups that strive to improve the lives of low-income people. I believe legal representation of individuals is essential to assisting low-income people. At the same time, thinking about the best ways to improve the lives of low-income people living in the United States, I also sometimes feel that the issues facing low-income people need to be solved collectively. (1) As I thought about an anti-poverty strategy, I was drawn to working with groups that were implementing such strategies, including groups advocating for and providing low- and moderate-income housing; working to improve education; providing community-based health care; providing child care; working with children and families on issues such as violence prevention; and advocating for jobs that pay enough for self support. I saw in community development lawyering the possibility to support groups working on an anti-poverty strategy.

   When I began teaching a Community Development Clinic, (2) I borrowed syllabi from others teaching similar clinical courses (3) A survey of other syllabi revealed that few, if any, clinics discussed the issue of poverty in the seminar component, at least explicitly. (4) I decided to raise this issue as one of the topics in my classroom component. (5) When poverty came up in class, many students reacted by asking: What does poverty have to do with our work? The students saw their work at the clinic as transactional in nature, not poverty-based. While the link was clear in my mind, I had failed to communicate that link to the students. I decided that I needed to be more explicit about discussions of poverty and the link between our work and issues of poverty. I moved the discussions of poverty to one of the first classes, after an introduction to the clinic and a tour of the community where we did a lot of work. (6) I decided to sacrifice content for context, (7) I continue to believe this was the right call. While not all the students get the connection (or care about it, for that matter), I feel an early discussion of poverty law issues makes it explicit that we represent groups working to improve the lives of low-income people. Additionally, I believe that one class (or even two) focused on issues of poverty is not enough to link the work of the clinic to anti-poverty lawyering. The clinic's case selection needs to make that connection explicit as well. Community development is thus one of a number of strategies that those of us interested in eliminating poverty and improving the conditions of those living in poverty must use.

   I will discuss the traditional view of poverty lawyering and community development lawyering before going on to discuss possibilities for strengthening the links between community development lawyering and anti-poverty strategies.

2. LAWYERS HAVE A ROLE TO PLAY IN SOCIAL CHANGE

   1. The Beginning of Poverty Law Practice

      Community development work has long played a role in antipoverty lawyering. A number of legal services programs have community development practices. (8) The National Economic Development Law Center has provided technical assistance to legal services programs for over thirty-five years. (9) Law school clinical programs came to this work much later. Though a number have been doing this work for some time, most clinical programs exclusively devoted to this type of work began less than twenty years ago. (10)

      For most of the past four decades, however, lawyering for low-income people has been viewed primarily from the perspective of individual representation, class-action litigation, legislative advocacy, and administrative advocacy. Legal services to low-income communities trace their history to the 19th century in New York; throughout most of the 20th century legal aid organizations around the country focused on representation in individual cases, (11) Poverty law dramatically changed in the 1960s with the development of a body of law, (12) and the creation of the Legal Services Corporation. (13) The federally-funded legal services program was founded with the innovative idea that lawyers had a role in eliminating poverty. (14) "Legal services programs were responsible to all low-income people as a client community" and not just as individuals, and thus were charged with the responsibility of "identifying and understanding the needs of that community." (15) Clients served on the board of the local program and thus participated in identifying the problems that needed to be addressed as well as their solutions. Legal services programs were "committed to redressing historic inadequacies in the enforcement of legal rights of poor people." (16) Programs had to "respond to need rather than demand," and thus be "proactive, empower clients, and achieve community goals." (17) Finally, the programs provided a "full range of service and advocacy tools," including administrative and legislative advocacy at the national and state levels. (18) By filing a series of test cases, legal services lawyers sought to resolve many of the problems faced by low-income persons through class action lawsuits designed to achieve judicial recognition of various constitutional rights, including the right to a subsistence income. (19)

      Funding cuts and other restrictions in the 1980s and 1990s restricted the ability of legal services programs to reach much of their client population and to use a broad range of lawyering tools, (20) Throughout the programs' life, a number of supporters of legal services critiqued the service delivery model for failing to "address the root causes of poverty or to play a significant role in the political, community-based struggles of poor communities." (21)

   2. Critique of Poverty Law Practice

      The critique of traditional poverty law practice has been around at least since the 1960s, when Jean Cahn and Edgar Cahn wrote about the "centralized, comprehensive, and professionalized poverty programs" that were being created. (22) Paul Tremblay identifies two dominant themes in this critique of traditional poverty lawyering: client voice and empowerment-based practice. (23) The first theme critiques lawyers for silencing clients' stories and voices so that the lawyer's voice is the only one that matters. (24) The second theme questions litigation as the best approach to resolve disputes involving subordinated persons because it perpetuates and reinforces client powerlessness. (25) Litigation tends to force clients to be dependent on the lawyer as well as reinforce the status quo. (26) The alternative, this view posits, is a more meaningful collaboration between lawyer and client, so that lawyers work with, not just on behalf of, subordinated people. (27)

      Within the idea of "rebellious lawyering against subordination," lawyers "must know how to collaborate with other professional and lay allies." (28) We "must understand how to educate those with whom [we] work about law and professional lawyering" and "[we] must open ourselves to being educated by the subordinated ... about their traditions and experiences." (29) Lawyers need to be able to work with legal and non-legal approaches to problems; they must participate in--as well as build--coalitions. (30) This form of lawyering contrasts with the regnant idea of lawyering, where lawyers formally represent clients, by working alone for them in a relationship where the lawyers dominate and the clients are only present when absolutely necessary. (31) In the regnant model, lawyers work in isolation of "the know-how and problem solving sensibilities of others." (32)...