Last summer, State Support began a monthly webinar series to share more about the work of legal services organizations statewide. The aim of the series is to foster connections and referrals between programs by taking a closer look at each program’s work.
On June 11, 2020, the series featured Sara Sommarstrom, director of the Vetlaw program at Minnesota Assistance Council for Veterans (MAC-V). MAC-V’s mission is to end veteran homelessness in Minnesota. Here are excerpts from that conversation.
How did MAC-V get started and how does the Vetlaw program fit in?
Minnesota Assistance Council for Veterans started in January 1990 as a small housing program with some transitional housing at the Minneapolis VA Campus. It is now a statewide program with three main components: housing, employment and legal. The housing program can pay rent, utilities, mortgages or even buy a veteran a cord of wood in order to prevent homelessness. 2011 was the first year MAC-V got a grant that included legal services. Essentially, we do poverty law for veterans. The issues our clients face are very similar to those seen by other legal aid providers.
What types of cases should people refer to MAC-V?
We will talk to any veteran at any income level about any legal problem. We may not be able to provide services, but we want to create that access to justice entry point and will work to get a veteran connected to the right resources if it’s not us. If we do provide more in-depth legal services, we work with people with incomes up to 300% of FPG and there needs to be a connection to housing stability. We can be creative about that connection because it does not just mean eviction or foreclosure defense. Many times, it means working on child support or other family law matters or debt collection defense. We do not offer representation in criminal law, but we will talk to them and explain their options. The only people we won’t talk with are people who are in conflict with the veteran, like a child seeking guardianship over their veteran parent.
Let’s talk about how you deliver services, or at least did before COVID-19.
Our primary service model before COVID was focused on brief service and brief advice. We’ve done a series of legal clinics all around the state. A typical clinic day will serve 85 – 100 veterans with the support and work of about 50 volunteers. Our volunteers on site include law students, lawyers, paralegals and other volunteers. There’s no pre-screening, just a drop-in model. When we are scheduling volunteers, we try to get a good diversity of legal subject matter expertise and do a lot of co-counseling. We do our best to help the person understand and address the legal issue.
We plan to start these clinics again and have one tentatively planned in Glencoe on July 29th. We also usually do a monthly clinic at the VA Medical Center, which is obviously not happening at the moment.
We also participate in Stand Down events. These are a service fair model with a variety of components: medical, housing, employment, legal, haircuts and some court components. In the past we’ve gotten statewide jurisdiction for the day and a Judge can resolve fines and fees that day. One of the main things we end up working on is helping regain driver’s licenses, which is so important in rural areas.
Finally, we sometimes contract with legal aid offices who agree to represent veterans on housing stability issues. It makes much more sense for MAC-V to pay a lawyer, at say LSNM, to attend a 5- minute hearing in their service area than it does to pay our staff attorney to drive 10 hours round trip.
Veterans are like any other low income population seeking services. In 2008, the top ten unmet needs for veterans were legal needs – child support was on the list. VA has a Section 8 voucher program. Even with voucher, veterans couldn’t get housing because of poor credit, past eviction, etc. They are over-represented in the homeless population and almost 2x as likely to be homeless if they fall under the poverty guidelines. POC are over-represented in the homeless veteran population. Not every veteran has combat trauma or PTSD, but they don’t like asking for help.
What is a legal need you see a lot in your client population?
The biggest unmet need has historically been child support. Quite a few veterans are looking to right-size their support orders. Many had children young and tended to have children in other states because they were based elsewhere. This means we see lots of interstate child support orders, which is hard when the veteran lives in a different state from where the order is located. Because of the nature of military service, it may be that their active duty pay was much higher and now they are unemployed. People don’t necessarily know that you have to go back and modify the order, since child support doesn’t know when you stop working. This is one reason we bring child support workers to our onsite clinics.
Can you share a story of how this affects your clients?
We met a veteran living in transitional housing; he had come up from Texas and struggled a bit. His arrears were about $90,000 and the support order was from California. He didn’t know where to start. It turns out his daughter had been adopted when she was 12 and during that process, his ex-wife had lied to the court and not told them he was on active duty at the time of the adoption.
We were able to reach out someone in California to help him figure out the forms and get those submitted. I sat by him during the hearing, which was on speakerphone, and the Judge was clearly upset that the ex-wife had lied during the adoption hearing. The Judge asked what he could afford to pay and the veteran said “$8.00.” I thought that was going to be the end of the hearing but surprisingly to me, the Judge agreed to that amount. He was compliant for the rest of his life paying $8.00 per month.
That wasn’t even representation. It was helping remove the barriers to access, knowing the people to call, and assisting in filling out forms. It doesn’t always take representation in court to get a really good outcome for somebody.
You recently did some creative work on return on investment, can you talk about that?
As a program that does mostly brief service, we face a lot of challenges for outcome reporting. Last year we connected with the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School volunteer consultant program to help us. We had an amazing team of smart students who helped examine the societal return on investment of free services. Part of what we wanted was to figure out how we could track outcomes without needing to call people for follow-up. We figured out that we had good data related to eviction cases. We could use MNCIS to see what the case outcome was. And because our housing support program tracks when they provide payments, it’s easy to cross reference and see if someone is still in housing. Even just looking at 89 eviction cases, the ROI was estimated at $60,000. This helps us to show ROI compared with the cost of the clinics and then we can explain how this brief service makes changes in people’s life.
For more about MAC-V, listen to the entire recording of this interview through GoToWebinar. You will be asked to enter a name and e-mail address to access the recording.