You can support our work by donating to the universal fund. The universal fund ensures that we can represent residents in all their issues – both ones we can publish and ones we cannot. The universal fund also allows us to make strategic investments that expand our capacity and increase the total number of people we’re serving.
Open Door Legal
PO Box #369
San Francisco, CA 94112
You can view all of the ways to give at https://opendoorlegal.mystagingwebsite.com/donation-information.
Please contact laurat@opendoorlegal.org if you have any questions or need any additional information. Thank you so much for the support!
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.
