“My client never thought that she could get help for living in mold and mildew; that was everyday life for her. And we didn’t stop there. ‘Do you have any custody issues? Do you need to speak with a social worker? We can help you with that too.’”
The United States has the developed world’s highest poverty rate, despite having the second highest rate of social expenditures in the world.How can we let so many live such precarious lives? Why would we ever believe we have a just society?
The more we dived into the problem, the more we began to see that legal services was a huge (and overlooked) part of the solution. The United States was the only developed country in the world that doesn’t guarantee access to legal representation, and this fact alone results in untold billions of dollars in assets expropriated from low-income communities of color each year. It felt almost like the problem was so big, that people had trouble seeing it. What if the heart of poverty in America was simply injustice?
Our co-founders, Adrian Tirtanadi and Virginia Taylor, met in law school and decided together to pioneer the country’s first system of universal access in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco: a historically black and historically marginalized part of the city. We opened for services on January 7th, 2013, in the back of a Salvation Army. The first few years were incredibly difficult: always short of cash, we did the best we could to serve as many people as possible. We cleaned out an old closet and turned it into a meeting room. We hand-shredded our documents and managed reception ourselves. And in the first few years, we represented hundreds of families in areas like housing, family, and consumer law.
Within Bayview, we represented about five families on every residential block, and secured over $45 million in direct assets for low-income residents, among many other outcomes.
We were moved by the urgency of now and the scale of the problem to take immediate action. We believed then, and still believe now, that we can together make a world where the law truly belongs to all of us and where the heart of poverty has been removed.
