Client-Clinic Collaborations: How to Incorporate Meaningful Partnerships with Your Clients into Representation, Reform and Response

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Session Type: AALS Programs

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Salon 4 and 9

Floor: Third Floor

During the last two decades, parents and youth in the child welfare system have developed strategies along with their legal advocates to enhance their role in improving outcomes in individual cases and to initiate and collaborate in systemic reform efforts. Advocates have learned from this collaboration to improve their representation and partner more fully with their clients in addressing the impact of child welfare policies on families and communities. Clinics specializing in parent, youth, and child representation have been at the forefront of these efforts, developing partnerships with their clients and their communities to reimagine the ways in which they represent and collaborate with their clients to achieve systemic reform.

Through a structured conversation with two Chicago advocates, both prominent activists in systems reform with personal involvement in the child welfare system, we will discuss the ways in which collaborative advocacy has developed in different parts of the country, the challenges and benefits of that collaboration, the similarities and differences in how youth and parent self-advocacy and collaborative advocacy with clinics and law offices have developed, and how to improve strategies for continuing collaboration and expanding it beyond the boundaries of existing efforts. In doing so, we hope to explore how youth and adult engagement in response and reform may take place in different contexts and use different avenues of communication and participation to be effective.

We hope through this process not only to draw on historical ways in which our clinical programs have collaborated with clients within our direct services models and systemic advocacy efforts but also how to expand and improve that collaboration at this particular political moment when our clients and their communities are subject to aggressively repressive and punitive attacks and our students are hungry to engage in effective social justice practices.