November 1st, 2018

Palace of Fine Arts

3301 Lyon St
San Francisco, CA 94123

Sponsorship Information

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You know the statistic: each dollar donated to legal aid generates $21 in benefit to the community. You know that the ratio of legal aid attorneys to low-income Californians is a dismal 1:8,382, and that poor Americans face 260% more legal problems than middle-class Americans.

But this evening isn’t about those numbers.

It’s about the families that fought tooth and nail to save their homes and stay off the streets.

It’s about a mother, drowning in fines that she’d been wrongfully charged, doing everything she can to give her daughter a better childhood than she had.

It’s about loving seniors who go to the ends of the earth to ensure that their children and grandchildren will have a place to live after they’re gone.

This night is about a community of people from all walks of life coming together under the shared conviction that a legal system is only fair when everyone has access to it.

Please join us to celebrate the successful outcomes that our staff, clients, and donors have worked together to make a reality. Last year, tickets sold out in just two weeks. Get yours before they’re gone!

If you have any questions please contact hannah@opendoorlegal.org.

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Thank you to our 2018 Sponsors!

Protector Sponsors

Community Sponsors

Melanie Hamburger

& John Caletti

In-Kind Sponsors

Interested in becoming a sponsor? Click here to find out more information about the benefits of sponsorship.

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CITATIONS

1. American University, Key Studies and Data About How Legal Aid Improves Housing Outcomes https://www.american.edu/spa/jpo/toolkit/upload/housing-7-30-19.pdf

2. George Washington Law School, In Pursuit of Justice? Case Outcomes and the Delivery of Unbundled Legal Services https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi

Ever since childhood, our co-founder Adrian has been dedicated to reducing poverty.

He studied systemic poverty in college and went to work in the field for a few years. Eventually, he had a thesis that legal aid was the most cost-effective way to address poverty in America. He wrote up a business plan and used it to apply to law school. 

The idea was to create the country’s first system of universal access to civil legal representation that ensures everyone can obtain timely, competent legal help for any legal issue, regardless of ability to pay. That had never been done before in the history of the United States.

In law school, he met Virginia, our Programs Director. Together, they co-founded the organization, two weeks after Adrian passed the bar.

When we opened we put a sign in the window, and with just that marketing and almost no other outreach we were overwhelmed with requests for help from people with good cases who had been turned away everywhere else.

Our first year we had revenue of $35,000. We would hand shred documents because a shredder was too expensive. Despite the financial challenges, we were able to work on over 280 cases in everything from housing law to family law to consumer law in the first year alone.

The hours were extreme, the pay was low, and the learning curve was steep. Still, we persisted. We knew that almost everyone we helped was not able to receive services anywhere else. Eventually, we attracted the interest of funders. We tripled our revenue for several years in a row. In 2015, we won the Bay Area Google Impact Challenge, which enabled us to expand even more. In 2019, we secured additional funding from the city that allowed us to open two new centers in the Excelsior and Western Addition.

As of 2020, our staff has grown to 27 full-time employees. We’ve shown that universal access is possible. Now, we plan to scale city-wide, make San Francisco the first city in the country’s history to have universal access to legal help, and become a model for national replication.