"Finding Hope in Each Other”: Capacity-Building through Cross-Clinic Collaborations & Community Partnerships

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Franciscan C

Floor: Ballroom Level

Refugee crises, climate change disasters, mass shootings, pandemics, and the list goes on. Clinicians are regularly called on to address urgent legal needs in our communities. When forced to face these challenges alone, the situation can feel overwhelming, especially given our need to contemporaneously teach students. This past year, a group of immigration clinics in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area collaborated to address a tremendous local need together—assisting recently resettled Afghans, thousands of whom would be facing the asylum system without legal representation. After forming a working group, we collaborated with area refugee resettlement agencies and nonprofits to provide know your rights presentations, organized declaration drafting workshops, and conducted mock Asylum Office interviews. For the first half of this session, we will outline the ways in which we identified legal needs in our local communities that were amenable to clinical work, how we structured our respective workshops, and how we strengthened our schools’ relationship with alums by incorporating them as volunteer attorneys. For the second half of this session, we will divide the attendees into small groups based on their geographical location and invite them to reflect on opportunities for collaboration. Our goal is to see other clinicians similarly connect with fellow law school clinics in their geographic area to strategize about ways they could collaborate to address an unmet or emerging legal need.