Talking Legal Aid With Executive Director DarKenya Waller

DarKenya Waller introduces herself as head of the largest nonprofit law firm in the state of Tennessee, explains how Legal Aid helps clients, how clients reach us, and the impact Legal Aid has had in its almost 60-year existence.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hello and welcome to Talking Legal Aid, a podcast that takes you inside Tennessee's largest nonprofit law firm. I'm Dean Hinton, a licensed attorney for Legal Aid of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands. Whether you're an attorney or a person with a legal problem looking for help, we are here for you. We are in the studio today with Darkinha Waller, the Executive Director of Legal Aid. We're going to talk today about what legal aid is, who we can help, and how we can help them. Darkenya, first of all, remind me, how long have you been the executive director of legal aid?

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Thanks for having me, first of all. But I've been executive director since 2018, so I guess it's coming up on eight years now. And been with legal aid for almost 18 years. That blows my mind when I think about it.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

You've been with legal aid all that time. This legal aid or another legal aid? I know you went to school at Ole Miss.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

I did, I did. And um I did do some externship and volunteer work while I was at legal aid, both at Central Mississippi Legal Services and also North Mississippi Legal Services, but those are purely during law school. This is my first and only stint as an employee of a legal services program. And I thought I'd maybe come for a couple of years, and 18 years later here I am.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Are you saying that you went straight from law school into legal aid?

SPEAKER_01 1:24

I did not. I did not. Actually, I had a lot of great experience in the field. I uh started my work with the Attorney General's office in Mississippi, did some work there, left there, went into small practice, the boutique personal injury law firm where I did that as well as family law and and housing, went into solo practice for a period of time, which I enjoyed immensely, into a boutique law firm where we only did family law, and then found my way to Nashville, Tennessee, where I started doing family law and housing work, but had the pleasure of working under the incomparable Gene Crow.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

And is that what attracted you to legal aid?

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Um, honestly, it was the fact that I had both family law and housing experience in the role they were looking for was someone who did both of those things. And so it was a perfect fit. And come to find out, my boss at my prior job and Gene Crow actually worked together through the ABA family law unit, and it just worked out, it just worked out well. And so I I made the transition and and started with working with legal aid. And interestingly enough, I kind of knew that at some point I'd make it back to public interest work. I I am a preacher's kid, uh daughter of two two ministers, and we were always the hands and feet of God, as they would say. So all the things that needed to be done around the church or in preparation for whatever event that we were doing, I was doing that. And I knew at some point I'd make it back to this.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Not to get too personal, but you both your mother and your father are ministers? That's correct. Oh, interesting. In Mississippi? That's correct. Oh.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

Yeah, yeah. Uh my father uh actually was a pastor for some time, but spent the majority of his time as an evangelist, primarily speaking in prisons around the country and around the world. And my mother uh supported him in his ministry for sure. But the Bible talks about there are some preachers, some teachers, some evangelists, some apostles. My my mother's more the teacher and spent a lot of time teaching in ministry and even now produces a a daily devotional where she's teaching.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

Jean Crow, if I read into what you say, and I could be wrong about this, did she kind of recruit you?

SPEAKER_01 3:34

I I wouldn't say that she recruited me, but I certainly listed my current employer as a reference, and when she saw the name, immediately knew who he was, had the highest respect for him and his practice. It it wasn't long after I heard that I got the call to say we want you to come on board.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

I never got to meet Jean Crow, but she my my understanding is she's very well known a domestic violence advocate, did a lot of divorces, orders of protection, things like that. There's actually a building named after downtown Nashville.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

That's correct. That's correct. And very instrumental in so many of the things that so many of the protections that we ha now have in place legislatively around domestic violence. Very instrumental in the drafting of some of the order protection statutes that we now follow, in addition to the significant work that's been done in Nashville relative to the Office of Family Safety, which was a department that did not exist years ago, but she was very instrumental in conducting the safety and accountability study that helped to create that department and the family safety center and the gene crow advocacy center that the city now uses.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

I'm sure you've been in that building, but I I've toured it twice. It's a very impressive building, the Gene Crow Center.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

It is. Both the Gene Crow Center and the Family Safety Center are actual actually not only national models but international models. They have visitors that come from around the country and around the world to actually tour the space with the goal of replicating it. And the director of that space, Diane Lance, was very visionary in how all of that came together and how she created it. Specifically, she included a lot of buy-in and she wanted it to be a space that we felt we all felt ownership in. And so literally things like the paint color on the wall, the chairs that were chosen, the space and how it functioned, the rooms that were included for both the Gene Crow Advocacy Center and the Family Safety Center were all collaborative efforts. We we met regularly to design all of the spaces to consider what should be in it, including if you walk into the uh Family Safety Center, there's a welcome wall, and that welcome wall has the word welcome in every possible language. That wasn't unintentional, it was very thoughtful. And the members or the people who were involved in helping to design the building, including myself, were all a part of it.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

And those two spaces are designed specifically for domestic violence survivors as they go through the court system, whether it's uh divorce, some sort of criminal action against their abuser or order protection or what have you, to save space for them and their children to go to as they go through the court system. Nashville, as I understand it, was at the forefront of those kind of spaces when they first came online. Now turning our attention toward legal aid, because that's kind of why we're here today. We want to talk about what legal aid is, and I'm gonna start us off. It is a nonprofit law firm. That is correct. That does what?

SPEAKER_01 6:24

It is a nonprofit law firm that offers free civil legal services to low-income and vulnerable people. And we do distinguish free civil because oftentimes when people think free lawyers, they think public defender's office, they think crime and being arrested. And we are not that. We are probably the the the other side of that. If uh the public defender's office offers criminal representation, we offer civil.

SPEAKER_00 6:54

Yeah, civil. We're talking about divorces, we're talking about orders of protection, we're talking about landlord ten issues like uh some sort of breach of contract or something like that, in inhospitable living conditions, all of the all of those. Expungements. We're big on expungements now. Um we do we're doing clinics in our office, a lot of expungement clinics. I'm sure they're doing it in other offices too. I'm just so know what we're doing in our office, yeah. Uh the Gallatin Office of Legal Aid. What else do we do?

SPEAKER_01 7:18

Well, our our ultimate goal is to help people advance, defend, and enforce their legal rights to secure basic necessities. That really is our focus, is basic necessities. And why is it basic necessities? Because there are so many people who don't have that. And that is kind of where we where we start. Not that other things are luxuries, but people should have their basic necessities. What is that? That's safety. People should be safe. That's shelter. If we can help people achieve sh uh shelter, that's food. If we can help remove barriers to people getting access to food. Those are are are some of the core basic necessities that that we focus on as an organization. But that can flourish into things like education, helping children get the level of of services they need in order to be successful in the classroom. Sometimes there are children who aren't able to access that effectively or their parents or guardians are unable to advocate for the needs of their children adequately, and we step in to do that. That looks like health care is a basic necessity. Um we have unfortunately children and adults who need access to health care, who have medical procedures that need to be done. And of course, the hospitals are not going to turn people away, but they may very well walk away with significant debt, medical debt, as a result of the procedures that were provided. That medical debt can be crushing. We have a recent example of a child going into the pediatric intensive care unit for a period of time and in no time racking up over a million dollars in medical debt. That would be crushing for anyone. And then, you know, the parents are expected to survive after that. And we our attorney was able to step in and help to remove the barriers to accessing certain medical coverage and to help that family avoid what could have been catastrophic end as a result of medical debt. So health care and and choices within healthcare, not just the accessing of the health care itself, but certain benefits within it, or preserving assets so that people don't find themselves spiraling into poverty, whether that's uh achieving Social Security SSI benefits, uh supplemental security income benefits, or any other kind of income maintenance to help people survive. Our goal is really to remove the barriers that keep people from being successful or self-sufficient.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

Yeah, uh the I think the term we use a lot, legal aid, maybe even outside of legal aid, is access to justice. We're trying to help people on the lower end, especially on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, uh, be able to access the courts or or at least information. And if we can't take them uh what we call full service, in other words, if we can't go into court with them, we'll at least try to give them enough resources where they can either do it themselves or find someone who can help them do that. Absolutely. Did I kind of say that right?

SPEAKER_01 10:26

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. That that is our goal. Unfortunately, because we are not a governmental entity, because we don't have a direct tax base that supports the work we do, because we are a nonprofit, we are dependent on grants, whether federal or or private foundations as well as donations to do the work that we do. And anytime you're dependent on those kinds of resources, um your your services may very well be limited. There's just simply not enough to go around. And so we as an organization, on a on a local level, but actually as a national statistic, turn away about half of the people who call us for help, about 50% of the people who actually reach out to us for help are turned away. And it's not because their legal matter isn't important. It and it's not always because they don't have a valid case. It's simply because we don't have the resources to help everyone who needs our assistance. There are a lot of legal issues out there. People have a lot of challenges. A recent Justice Gap study produced by the Legal Services Corporation shared that people receive little or no help for 92% of their legal needs, their significant legal needs. So we're not just talking about a, you know, a boundary dispute between two people living living in a in a area. We're talking about people getting access to health care that they should be able to receive. The difference between, you know, sickness and health. We're talking about people who aren't receiving wages perhaps that they should be receiving, the difference between income and and poverty. These are real issues, and 92% of them go unaddressed or with little help when it comes to low-income and vulnerable populations.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

I remember even back in law school, the saying was there's an unlimited demand for free legal services. I think that's kind of what you're talking about here is we will get inundated almost on a daily-weekly basis with calls for service. We have clinics. We have we call counseling advice letters, we'll send someone a letter and tell them, This is how you file for divorce or something like that. There's full representation. I'm trying to think of any other ways we can. Oh, we might refer it to others, either to the private bar or to a bankruptcy attorney or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

Yeah, all of the above. We we try to explore every possible avenue to make up for that 50% gap. That that includes all of the things that you have named. Obviously, the the top tier level is somewhere between direct representation of us in court with someone who needs someone standing beside them, somewhere between that and making systemic change, having the conversations because we've developed the relationships with various departments to perhaps change things that could then have a significant impact down the line, that level of service to just simply giving information, giving just the the simplest piece of information because what we know is knowledge is power. And when people have the information, sometimes they can advocate for themselves if they only knew. And so there's a big range between us standing in court and just giving information. That range includes us uh soliciting pro bono attorneys. A lot of times people say, Oh, you should just get a pro bono attorney. Well, what they don't realize is one pro bono is not free. It takes someone who has the expertise and someone who has the need, and then someone to connect those two. And legal aid actually does that. We have people on staff whose job it is to recruit attorneys, to encourage them to support pro bono service, to encourage them to take cases, and then to actually in some instances train them to take those cases. And then those same persons on our staff will then vet certain cases that come through our intake line or our phone number, and we'll match those people who have the need with the attorney who has the expertise, and then support that attorney along the way as well as support the the client as needed to make sure they get to the desired end. That is not free. But that's one of the ways we we leverage to try and cover that 50%. To the point that you made, we have legal clinics where people can come and get information from lawyers or get direct advice regarding their specific legal matter. We have trainings and and and community education where we'll go out into the community and educate people on their legal rights, whether that's through documents we produce, we have a website where we have our community classroom, and that community classroom is just chocked full of answers to questions that are frequently asked. What do I do with the order of protection I just received? How do I enforce it? How do I get my security deposit back if I'm you know if I'm moving out? How can I represent myself in court?

SPEAKER_00 15:24

That's the one I like. How to testify in court? Yeah. How to testify in court. That empowers people. I get a lot of very good comments on that. That specific one.

SPEAKER_01 15:31

And and that's again a part of us trying to address that 50% because we cannot, you know, stand in court with everyone, and people may call us from time to time and you'll hear that we are closed. And it's no different than if you go to a a provider and they tell you that they're not taking patients. It's because there's a level of care that they have to ensure for the people that they do represent. And if they are over overextended in that representation, then it it leads to malpractice. And our goal is to give high-quality legal services at all times. And that may very well mean that the people we do represent receive the highest level of quality, and that there are those who just we won't be able to represent. And so we find these other avenues to at least give them more information than they have when they called.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

You mentioned pro bono, finding a pro bono attorney if you know legal aid can't represent somebody. This happens to me frequently that I will have a discussion with somebody about why I can't represent them. It'll be like a counseling advice letter or something like that. And they'll say, you know, well, where can I get a free attorney? You know, you're you've did you've done family law, you've done a lot of family law. There's probably not gonna be somebody you're gonna get for free to do family law issues. It's just in my experience, it just doesn't happen. I mean, uh let's just say it's rare.

SPEAKER_01 16:47

Yeah. I I I would probably say that the the real challenge is is finding that needle in the haystack, finding that one attorney who may be willing to take your case. And I'm gonna date myself here and say that, you know, at one point you pick up the phone book and you just start going and go down the list calling people. And it's really just an inefficient way to try and find an attorney who may be willing to to take your case with at no cost. And so that's the service that we provide is that you don't go down the list calling everybody that you could possibly call on a cold call, hoping that they will have pity on your circumstance and help you. You call legal aid, and legal aid then goes to its network of over 350 attorneys and says, Hey, this is the legal issue that this person has. Would you be willing to take this case and help them through their matter? And those attorneys overwhelmingly say yes, we we will help. Our job is to help triage that, to distribute that so that those attorneys aren't overwhelmed because they have to make a living as well, but simultaneously folks are are getting the help that they need.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

One of the challenges I'm gonna call it a challenge. One of the challenges I think that all of us face, if I can speak for all of us, or at least me, is that not enough people know what who what legal aid is or who we are. In other words, I might even have clients who think that I'm part of the government. You just mentioned government. Uh they might think I'm part of the public defender's office, part of the prosecutor's office. Even though I'm representing them, we signed a retainer. Maybe I explain uh to them who we are, maybe I haven't explained it to them very well. One of the reasons maybe we're sitting here today trying to explain who we are is that the message needs to get out wider who we are. Even though we just told the listener that we can't represent any everybody, I am still looking, uh I do a lot of domestic violence work, divorces, orders of protection. I'm always looking for the worst of the worst. If there's been a very violent assault, physical assault, if someone's been beat up or gunpointed out or something, I want to know about that to help them get divorced. Now there's other ends of the spectrum where things are bad, but they're not that bad, and that might be where I cannot get involved because I'm already taking the worst of the worst. But all I wish to say is I think one of the challenges is that we at legal aid are not as well known perhaps as we would with just the general population. I think the legal population knows who we are.

SPEAKER_01 19:10

Yeah, no matter no matter how many speaking engagements I have, no matter how many surrogates we have out there speaking on our behalf, I'm always amazed at when I meet someone and they literally have no idea we existed. And it's just a challenge we have. I suppose, like any nonprofit that may not be the American Red Cross or, you know, Boys and Girls Club of America, it's a challenge to to get our services out there. And so we continue to do that. We'll we do podcasts like this, we we have the speaking engagements, we go into the communities to try and get the word out. But the the thing that people can do for us is to just share the message, is to tell people that we do exist. That being said, we t we turn away half the people who call us, right? So how far do you let that message go? How far do you do you do it? Our focus or vision, if you will, is to ensure that everyone has access to us. But there still has to be a triaging process once you get here. And we encourage people not to assume that they're not eligible for our services, they don't know until they apply. And that's why we have a triage, that's why we have intake. Let us decide who is eligible and who isn't based on the criteria that we have. And even if you're not, again, even if we can't take your case, our goal is to at least give you more information than you had when you first called us. But we do. Calls come in, we take all the calls in, we put them on a list unless there are clear lines of demarcation, and we can talk about that in terms of cases that we can do and then cases that we simply can't do. But every all the cases go on a list and we we triage those. And to be candid with you, we do have to look at you know certain things when when we prioritize those cases. And it's it's not a fun job, I'll tell you. It's probably, and you you see this, I'm sure, one of the hardest things that our attorneys or staff have to do is to determine between very worthy cases which ones we can take and which ones we can't. Because we know full well there's very few people who call us whose issue we can't resolve. Most of them we can resolve your issue, but it's a matter of us having to make the hard decisions between who we can and who we can't help simply based on capacity. So we do look at the severity of the legal issue. We do look at the vulnerability of the client, how vulnerable are they? We do look at the available staff, who do we have who can actually address the issue, and and what do our resources look like to be able to do it? And all of that factors into who we ultimately are able to help. And we do, you know, look at the cases that fall within our priorities and out of outside of our priorities. And when I say priorities, I just mean the fact that I'm not gonna say it's impossible to help everyone, but it's probably inefficient to try and help everyone with every possible case type there is. It is more efficient to develop. Expertise in certain areas and to build relationships with decision makers in certain areas. It's much more beneficial for us to have a very good relationship with the Department of Human Services and the Department of Health so that if there are regulatory policy decisions that have been made, we have the influence and the relationships to go to them and say, Hey, did you know that this particular policy is impacting several thousand people in a negative way? Would you consider changing that so that those people aren't impacted in a way that I don't think you intended? That comes from us having an expertise in that area, working in that area, consistently being in front of them in that area, that they listen to us because they know we deliver high quality services, and if we say it, then it means something. And so we we leverage that, you know, to be able to help people, you know, get the outcome that they need. So we have to specialize in certain things, which means that there are things that we don't do. Some because of priorities we've chosen, and some are based on regulations or grant funding that permit don't permit us to do certain things. We are not permitted due to our largest funder, LSC, and the regulations that are associated with that funding because it is actually federal funding, although it is not, we're not a governmental entity. We receive some government funding, but we're not a governmental entity. And so, under that funding, for example, we can't do criminal cases. Why? There's a whole public defender's office. That's what they do. And so we don't do criminal cases, we're not permitted to. We don't lobby. We don't directly lobby with any federal agency because that's again something that we are not permitted to do. And so we don't do class actions because of that. We don't do personal injury cases or what we call fee generating cases, cases where we could actually generate income from the case, like a personal injury case. All of those considerations go into which cases we can and can't take. It's not arbitrary, it's not random. It is based on specific things.

SPEAKER_00 24:14

If I could use, I think a word you use, maybe Zach, our deputy director, uh uh, intentional. We were intentional about those sort of things. And by the way, I'm gonna throw out one of my own, uh, custody visitation, custody visitation issues. In other words, if it's not part of divorce, if someone's coming to legal aid just for a custody visitation issue. A lot of times, by the way, it's involves grandparents or something like that who have to step in and look after children when the parents can't do it. I do those at clinic, but as uh as you're talking about outside of our priorities, and one of the reasons I think I'm accurate in saying this is that if it rises to the level where our child is in danger, the DCS will get involved and hopefully see that through and take care of the child or children that are at issue.

SPEAKER_01 24:54

No, that that's absolutely the case in terms of priorities. We really have to evaluate a lot of things. And when it comes to those cases, there it's not impossible for us to do them, but we do we do have a policy, if you will, or at least a practice of trying not to duplicate efforts. If there's someone else who people can access to have certain services provided, we try not to duplicate that. We try and be where other attorneys are not so that people can get those services. And yes, to the extent that the Department of Children's Services can be involved to help protect the safety of children, there there are attorneys whose job is to protect those children. But I will tell you from a personal perspective, custody is something that's near and dear to my heart because I do know that there is a severe void, there's a severe lack of general representation in custody cases. And the truth of the matter is it's because of uh capacity. It it would be very easy for all of our attorneys to only do custody, and we would still probably be handling about 20% of the need, if that, and that's if all 55 of our attorneys only handle custody across our service area. We would we might touch 20% of the need. There's just a void, and it will take a significant effort, significant funding for us to be able to cover that area of law to the extent that it needs.

SPEAKER_00 26:22

People in the legal community, attorneys, judges, or whatever, are gonna tell people all the time that as a general rule, yes, you need an attorney to represent you. Yes, you need guidance. But I have had success stories, people get back to me later, where they came to clinic as a custody visitation sort of issue. We gave them the forms, we gave them some information about how to testify, for example, the brochure we were talking about earlier, and they've gotten to back to me and said everything worked out. And so I think we can empower people. Oh, and the the point I'm trying to make here is that family law especially, the courts are used to people coming in there representing themselves, pro se. It's very common. Again, everybody probably needs an attorney, but you can probably get the job done if you lose the emotion and you're prepared, maybe talk to whatever legal aid organizations in your area, is it a clinic or whatever, if you get the right guides and you don't go in there with an angry attitude, you probably can get the job done.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

It's it's just tough. I mean, even even the judges prefer not to see it where people come into court unrepresented and are trying to navigate the waters. But the fact of the matter is, because there is no right to an attorney in civil cases. There's an absolute right to an attorney if you've been arrested and you're facing loss of liberty or incarceration, but that right just does not exist in all civil cases. Because of that, people have to sometimes represent themselves because they simply cannot access the justice system in a meaningful way other than to represent themselves. And so, yes, those folks do walk into court to represent themselves. And the reason lawyers are so important is because we are a step removed. We are able to remove the emotion. And oftentimes it's challenging for individuals to be able to do that. We're talking about their child. There is no more primal instinct to do it than to do what you need to do to protect yourself or your child. And so it does make it challenging to walk into court, but with proper information, with guidance, yeah, people can. And there's a constitutional right. You have an absolute right to represent yourself in court. If you are unable or unwilling to have legal representation, you have that right. And you can absolutely do so if the information is provided, which is why we work so hard to make that available to the public in the event they find themselves in that situation and have to represent themselves.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

How do you see legal aid fitting into maybe the broader civil legal system? And maybe you've touched on this already.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

As I mentioned, there is no right to our services, which is why we are a nonprofit. We are a bunch of lawyers that got together and said that's really not okay that people have to go into court without a lawyer if they can't afford one on civil cases. That just doesn't seem right when we think about American jurisprudence. We think about the law. Nonprofit legal aids came about. Going back as far as the Johnson administration, they found that when we look at all of the possible safety nets that are out there, legal services dollar for dollar returns the highest on your investment. A report distributed by the Legal Services Corporation showed that there's a $7 return on investment for every $1 you invest in legal aid. And so, as far as back as the Johnson administration, they realized that if there was going to be a real attack or a real war on poverty, uh with the genuine goal to eliminate poverty, legal services has to be at the forefront of that. Legal services has to be front and center to make that happen. Why? Because we have the ability to force change in institutions. Because often the change is not one a one-off. It needs to be systemic, it needs to be institutional in order to get the widespread change that's needed. And we do that all the time. I mean, that's that's our role is that we not only represent the individual, but also the institution. In our efforts to do that, we're able to push the needle further, a little further, than otherwise people would be able to do on their own. And so we we make those services available. We try to the extent that we can.

SPEAKER_00 30:37

If this point hasn't been clear up to this point, we do not charge any of our clients for anything. Almost anything. There might be some litigation fees or something that we might ask them to pay if we think they can pay. But for the most part, a lot of our clients don't have any money or very little money. And we're a nonprofit. I get this question all the time how how does this work? I mean, how does this work behind the scenes? We're a nonprofit, so how do we make money or how do we get paid?

SPEAKER_01 30:59

That's another one of the things that we are unable to do due to uh regulations as a result of our largest funders, the Legal Services Corporation. We are unable to actually charge for our services. So it's not a decision that's being made. And we often hear from opposing counsel who's like, well, if people have more skin in the game, you know, they'd they'd maybe have a different result in their case. The fact of the matter is we're not permitted to charge. It's not a conscious decision we're making. We're not permitted by law to charge people for our services. Now, if our clients do pay anything, it may be for litigation expenses or things like that, but those fees don't go to us. They go to whoever the service provider is, whether that's a clerk's office for filing fees or a court reporter for a deposition, but those fees don't come to us. We we don't and can't charge. And so our funding does not primarily come from our clients nor our cases. We are, as I mentioned, funded in large part, or at least our largest funder is the Legal Services Corporation. And we've mentioned that a few times today. And the question is, who are they? What do they do? LSC or Legal Services Corporation is the entity to which Congress allocates some funding to support civil legal aid across the country. The nonprofit LSC was actually congressionally created, so it's a congressionally created nonprofit whose job is to distribute funding across the country to legal aid programs to provide civil legal aid to people. Their job is also to monitor and to regulate to ensure that we are spending those government funds the way they should. And I say some legal services because of our budget, the LSC funding represents around 30% of our budget. So there's another 70% that isn't represented by this particular funding source. But because it does represent the portion that it does, and because of how federal funding works, if you receive one dollar of that funding, then you are tied to the regulations that are associated with that funding. And those regulations are you can't do criminal cases, you can't do class action, you can't charge your clients, you can't lobby. And so those are some of the restrictions that we have in place because of the funds we receive from them. So we receive that funding, we receive funding from IOLTA, which is interest on lawyers, lawyer trust accounts. That's a deeper conversation. We receive funding from foundations, from the generosity of family foundations and other foundations, and then from individual donors, people who year over year are willing to say we want to support this work and we believe in it. Some of our most significant donors are law firms who say we know that there is a justice gap between those who can afford justice and those who can't afford justice, and we want to be a part of that solution, and so they annually make contributions to legal aid. And all of those in concert work together to ensure that we have funding year over year to pay our attorneys to represent folks. It is the generosity of the public that helps us to do this work.

SPEAKER_00 34:11

One of the challenges is to keep, I'm gonna say it this way, feeding the beast. In other words, if we're not charging clients, if we're not for profit, we're not profit. How do we get that money coming in? I just got an email the other day about, and this is taped in the spring of 2026. I just got an email that we're gonna we're kicking off a campaign. I think it's two million dollars. The goal is two million dollars from private donors to legal aid so we could keep going. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 34:34

That's absolutely right. That's absolutely right. And it is our largest, our largest fundraising goal to date. We typically try to raise somewhere around a million dollars per year, and this year we're actually doubling that. And we're doing that because we are facing certain uh funding cuts and we want to make sure that we can make up the difference. Certain federal dollars are going away, certain state dollars grants are going away, and we have to be able to make up that difference, or we have to cut services. And our goal is if you're already at 50%, our goal is to not be below 50%, and so we have to work to do that. So our goal is two million dollars this year. Every dollar counts. We are holding to our community, to the public to help us reach that goal because for every dollar we're able to raise and bring back in, those are people. Those are people that we're able to help. Those are domestic violence victims, we're able to help escape abuse of relationships. Those are those are seniors that we are able to ensure that they're protected or have access to certain needs that they have, whether it's income or health care or food, honestly. Those are people we're able to keep housed, those are vulnerable people that we're able to help get conservatorships or guardianships as needed. We're dependent and focused on the public to help us continue to do this important work.

SPEAKER_00 35:56

We'd like to thank Tarkania Waller, the Executive Director of Legal Aid, for coming into the studio to talk in this first episode of Talking Legal Aid. In our next episode, we will continue talking about who our clients are, how to reach us, and who are our staff members. All of that next time on Talking Legal Aid. Thank you for listening to this episode of Talking Legal Aid. I'm your host, Dean Henton. Legal aid of Middle Tennessee's website is LAS dot or G, and the podcast website is legal aid in action. Buzzsprout dot com. Don't give up hope.