CANCELLED - Soft Funding, Hard Truths: Creating a Sustainable Service Model Within A Soft-Funded Clinic

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: Marriott St. Louis Grand

Room: Portland

Floor: Grand Tower, Mezzanine Level

This session will provide concrete tools for soft-funded clinics to apply for grants or steady funding streams, provide examples of sustainable models, and also examine common pitfalls that impede client-centeredness and sustainability. The goal is to provide a realistic toolkit while also prompting introspection and brainstorming a more resilient clinical model together. At a time of rights retrenchment, ensuring the continuity, growth, and adaptability of law school clinics is essential to serving clients and driving positive change through the next generation of legal advocates. Law clinics operate in a capitalist environment, and organizing for social justice necessitates a clear-eyed view of the financial and business realities to survive. But true resilience goes beyond knowing the levers to pull and buttons to press: funding must serve longer term goals and align with client-driven values rather than hamstring reform. Spreading knowledge about how to get funding, while also grappling collectively with the ethics, will foster clinic resilience in service of clients.