The Economic Impact and Social Return on Investment of Alabama’s Legal Aid Providers, 0515 ALBJ, 76 The Alabama Lawyer 164 (2015)
| Author | Linda Lund, director, Alabama State Bar Volunteer Lawyers Program |
| Position | Vol. 76 3 Pg. 164 |
Linda Lund, director, Alabama State Bar Volunteer Lawyers Program
What would you guess is the return on each dollar invested to provide pro bono legal assistance in Alabama? Would you be surprised to find out that Alabama’s return on investment is higher than any other state in the United States?
The Alabama Civil Justice Foundation in September 2014 engaged Community Services Analysis LLC to answer these very questions by performing an analysis of the financial values of the civil legal aid service providers in Alabama and to document the immediate and long-term consequential effects to their communities. The results were staggering. In 2014 alone, Alabama’s five legal aid providers, the Alabama State Bar Volunteer Lawyers Program, the Birmingham Bar Association Volunteer Lawyers Program, the Madison County Volunteer Lawyers Program, the South Alabama Volunteer Lawyers Program and Legal Services Alabama, provided more than 200 different types of services, and handled more than 19,000 legal matters.
Community Services Analysis LLC (CSACO) is a leading provider of Social Return on Investment Analysis in the United States. Since 2007 CSACO has completed more than 100 SROI studies for local and state agencies around the country, including the State of Pennsylvania Department of Education, the State of California Department of Rehabilitation, the City of Philadelphia, United Way, United Cerebral Palsy, Habitat for Humanity and multiple legal aid organizations. Additionally, in 2013, following a detailed analysis, the National Legal Aid and Defenders Association selected CSACO as their exclusive SROI analysis national partner.
Social Return on Investment (SROI) is an approach to measure and understand the financial impact of a social services organization. While SROI is built on the logic of cost/benefit analysis, it is different in that it measures the comparable value of organizations whose results cannot be easily measured in money. In the same way that a business plan contains more information than simply financial projections, SROI provides information about actual and long-term results of services, and the qualitative, quantitative and financial information on which to base decisions about the delivery of social services by organizations.
An...
To continue reading
Request your trial