Boston Bar Foundation Grant Launches
Healthy Homes for Healthy Families

BOSTON, Apr. 20 -- Thanks to a $75,000 grant from the Boston Bar Foundation, the Medical-Legal Partnership for Children (MLPC) and the Volunteer Lawyers Project of the Boston Bar Association (VLP) will be able to launch the Healthy Homes for Healthy Families project.   Working collaboratively, the MLPC and VLP will expand their services to low-income families needing legal assistance to address unsafe housing conditions having a harmful impact on the health and well-being of their children.  The grant has been made possible by The John & Abigail Adams Benefit Ball held last November.

The MLPC operates within Boston Medical Center’s Department of Pediatrics and in pediatric clinics at several BMC-affiliated community health centers.  The MLPC’s core mission is to deploy legal advocacy to ensure that children’s basic needs – food, housing, education, health care and safety/stability – are met.  The VLP trains and mentors a panel of approximately 1,000 legal professionals who represent low-income residents of the Greater Boston area on a pro bono basis. 

Formalizing an ongoing partnership between MLPC and VLP, the grant will allow both organizations to capitalize on the particular strengths of each other’s programs.  The $75,000 in funding will be used to hire a staff attorney who will do two things:

1) Provide training, mentoring and backup to pro bono lawyers from designated law firms that have already been matched with a pediatric clinic at a BMC-affiliated community health center.  (For example, Day Pitney and Holland & Knight staff legal clinics at East Boston and South End South Centers respectively, and Foley Hoag staffs a legal clinic at the South Boston Community Health Center.) 

2) Identify any additional cases that should be directed to the VLP, including, for example, work done through the Lawyer for a Day Program at the Boston Housing Court, an initiative operated by the Real Estate Section of the Boston Bar Association with significant help from the VLP.

The collaboration between MLPC and VLP is expected to yield data in support of what legal services providers have always known to be true: that a family’s health and well-being are improved when its legal needs are met.