Neighborhood Legal Services, Inc.

NLS's multi-lingual and multi-cultural staff of 14 attorneys, 2 paralegals and support personnel assist more than 3500 individual clients each year to meet their most pressing legal needs; most concerning access to food, shelter, personal safety, health care and economic resources. We provide direct representation in complex family law cases for victims of domestic violence. We represent clients in housing cases involving defense of evictions, access to subsidies and other affordable housing resources, and in matters concerning housing conditions and safety. We represent low income individuals and families facing denials, terminations and reductions in public benefits and health care access, employment rights violations, civil rights and discrimination in housing and employment. We represent elders in all of these matters and, in addition, in matters concerning estate planning, nursing home access and abuse, financial exploitation and consumer debt. NLS operates a low income taxpayer clinic that assists consumers secure the Earned Income Tax Credit and other little known tax benefits and provides representation concerning tax controversies. NLS also provides limited assistance advice services, pro se clinics and community education materials for clients with a wide range of less pressing legal needs. NLS operates a "community counseling" program that provides legal assistance to help establish, strengthen, secure funding for and plan programs to be undertaken by neighborhood groups and other client-controlled institutions in low income communities, all designed to strengthen community power and resources, provide jobs, develop affordable housing, improve neighborhoods, and encourage resident control. NLS also strikes a balance between individual representation and complex, systemic advocacy. Recent complex cases have stopped the demolition of more than 200 SRO housing units in Lynn, Masssachusetts, prevented the conversion of a 285 unit affordable housing project in Salem, Massachusetts to luxury housing, caused a fundamental consumer-friendly redesign of the disability determination system for Massachusetts public assistance programs, and established new fairness standards for consumers seeking shelter in the Massachusetts homeless shelter system. NLS also maintains for all Massachusetts legal services programs a state wide consumer legal education website, www.neighborhoodlaw.org providing more than 200 different articles and fact sheets containing simple, understandable explanations of the law in the areas of housing, consumer, elder, welfare,family and education. This resource is used by more than 1000 Massachusetts residents each week.