Good Morning Client Access and Intake Workgroup Members,

We convened a stakeholder meeting at the Statewide Legal Advocate Training on October 9, 2018. During this well attended meeting, we reviewed our call to action from the state plan to improve access to and effectiveness of our existing intake mechanism. We presented our definition of intake—the process by which a person learns about and requests services from legal aid, is assessed for eligibility and nature of legal problem, and legal services are initiated. We then spent the majority of the meeting discussing the workgroup’s next steps, including a discussion of how we can ensure that we are including a race equity lens in our work plan.

We initially proposed the following work groups:

• Inventory intake processes used by civil legal aid organizations & map Washington’s intake network

• Consult with community partners about intake

• Gather information from clients about expectations for intake

• Research intake used in other states

The overwhelming response at the intake meeting was to start first and foremost with the clients’ experience moving through our current intake systems. The encouragement from the participants of this forum was to talk with both people who make it through and those who do not and to reach out to not just partners, but to organizers in communities of color. 

Due to this feedback, we would like to propose first that we reconvene our workgroup and narrow our focus to developing an outreach plan to gather meaningful client input and guidance regarding our intake system.  We will need to discuss how this outreach may overlap with Goal 2 of the state plan focusing on increasing legal education and awareness.

Please complete the following doodle poll and we well send out a meeting confirmation as soon as possible: https://doodle.com/poll/w65kqwzuwff66r3m

Thank you all for engaging in this work.

Sincerely,

Catherine Brown

Joanna Otero

Eva Wescott

Co-chairs