Board Meeting Transcripts 2003

 

COMMITTEE MEMBERS PRESENT:
Ernestine P. Watlington, Chair 
Douglas S. Eakeley 
Maria Luisa Mercado 
F. William McCalpin

BOARD MEMBERS PRESENT:
Hulett H. Askew 
LaVeeda Morgan Battle 
John T. Broderick, Jr. 
John N. Erlenborn 
Edna Fairbanks-Williams 
Thomas F. Smegal, Jr.

STAFF AND PUBLIC PRESENT: 
Victor M. Fortuno, Vice President for Legal Affairs, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary 
Randi Youells, Vice President for Programs 
Mauricio Vivero, Vice President for Governmental Relations and Public Affairs 
John Eidleman, Acting Vice President for Compliance & Administration 
Leonard Koczur, Acting Inspector General 
Laurie Tarantowicz, Assistant Inspector General and Legal Counsel 
David Maddox, Assistant Inspector General for
Resource Management 
David L. Richardson, Treasurer & Comptroller 
Michael Genz, Director, Office of Program Performance 
Elizabeth Ardledge, National Legal Aid and Defenders Association 
Linda Perle, Senior Attorney, Legal Services, Center for Law and Social Policy 
Frank Strickland, Attorney, Strickland Brockington Lewis, L.L.P. (Nominee) 
Robert Dieter, University of Colorado (Nominee) 
Michael McKay, McKay Chadwell (Nominee) 
Florentino Subia (Nominee) 
Lillian R. Bevier, University of Virginia School of Law (Nominee) 
Bob Clyde, Executive Director, Ohio Legal Assistance Foundation 
Juanita Bing Newton, Deputy Chief Administrative Judge for Justice Initiatives, State of New York Unified Court System 
Wilhelm Joseph, Executive Director, Legal Aid Bureau of Maryland 
L. John Ross, Chairman, Special Committee of Legal Aid Indigent Defendants 
Richard Forza, Forza Associates 
Patricia Hanrahan, Special Counsel to the VP for Programs 
Patricia de Marco, Counsel, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary 
Ed Jurkevics, Chesapeake Analytics 
Gordon Buck, President, Statewide Legal Services of Connecticut 
Althea Hayward, Program Analyst for State Planning, OPP 
Alice Dickerson, Director, Office of Human Resources 
Lynn Bulan, Senior Assistant General Counsel 
Glenn Rawdon, Program Counsel, OPP 
Monica Holman, Program Analyst, OPP

C O N T E N T S
	Page
Approval of agenda	4
Approval of minutes of 11/8/02 meeting	4
Strategic Directions 2002-2005: Submission of 2002 Progress Report for Programs - Randi Youells	5
Perspectives on GIS Mapping Office of Inspector General's Report on Mapping Evaluation - Leonard Koczur, David Maddox, and Ed Jurkevics	10
Report of Office of Program Performance on LSC Technology Grants Designed to Enable Grantees to Use GIS Mapping in a Cost-Effective Manner - Glenn Rawdon	42
The State Planning Evaluation Instrument:  Design and Implementation - Bob Gross, Neal Dudovitz, Bob Clyde, Judge Juanita Bing Newton	52
The LSC Diversity Training Module/Next Steps Pat Hanrahan, Gurdon H. Buck, Wilhelm Joseph, and Althea Hayward	84
Consider and act on other business	126

MOTIONS:

4,  129

P R O C E E D I N G S

CHAIR WATLINGTON: We want to get started here. It's 9:00. We got a full agenda, so we want to get started. Good morning to everyone.

ALL: Good morning.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: I would like to start with the -- the approval of the agenda. Do we have a --

M O T I O N

MS. MERCADO: So moved.

MR. EAKELEY: Second.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: It's been moved and seconded. Now all in favor signify by saying the word "aye."

(Chorus of ayes.)

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Opposed, the same.

(No response.)

CHAIR WATLINGTON: It's moved and carried for the agenda.

Approval of the minutes of the committee meeting of November 8, 2002.

M O T I O N

MR. McCALPIN: Move approval.

MS. MERCADO: Second.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: All in favor --

(Chorus of ayes.)

CHAIR WATLINGTON: -- state aye. Opposed, the same.

(No response.)

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Moved, minutes moved. Next, we'll have -- she is already up, Vice President of Programs, Ms. Randi Youells.

MS. YOUELLS: Good morning. Good morning, Madam Chair; good morning, members of the committee. I am just going to take a few minutes this morning, since you have a very full agenda with a lot of important dignitaries who will be speaking to you on important subjects.

But I wanted to call to your attention that this is the third year in a row the program side of the house has submitted to you our annual report documenting our work in meeting your strategic plan, strategic directions. And I'll call it to your attention as published and distributed in the board materials that you received approximately 10 days ago.

The strategic directions called upon the program staff to enhance and improve quality, and enhance and improve access. And we began in January of 2001, to document for you the important work that we do to meet those twin goals of your strategic plan.

This year we took a slightly different format in presenting our work to you for 2002. Over time, we have learned that if we are going to enhance access and improve quality, we do so by building healthy and vibrant programs, and healthy and vibrant state justice communities.

So the 27 pages that are in your board book document with some detail the work that we did to meet those twin goals, improving access, enhancing quality, building healthy and vibrant state justice communities, and building a healthy and vibrant legal services programs.

Reginald Heber Smith, who is known as the father of legal aid, said over 100 years ago that the single greatest impediment to achieving justice for low income people is the lack of funding for legal services programs in this country.

That remains as true today as it did 100 years ago. But in this report we have tried to show you how we and our grantees, who provide critical legal services to low income people throughout this great country, have worked to ensure that low income people have access to justice, even recognizing that we are not funded fully to do the work that we do.

So I just call it to your attention, and thank you very much.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Thank you.

MR. EAKELEY: Let me just make one -- two comments. First, I wanted to commend you on the report. It's really, I think, a better reporting format because it has everything in one place and it just presents very well. The cavil I have is that in all of the report we devote only one paragraph, a small paragraph on page 13, to measurement of outcomes.

I know this is a work-in-progress, but I -- and I think I am just confirming the fact that despite the appearance the investment in and commitment to developing a means of measuring outcomes, we can gauge access provided and quality of service afforded is going to be there at the end, maybe not for this board.

MS. YOUELLS: Perhaps not for this board, except you will be hearing later today a report on the state planning evaluation instrument that does begin to capture some of that information, in terms of the performance of state justice communities.

But you are also aware, and I know it's a huge concern of yours, that we have not moved as quickly as you and I might have liked to develop a system to measure outcomes in terms of client service.

Beginning this month, we have hired a consultant. We have hired a consultant, who, in fact, has entered into a six month period of time to gather information and data and do strategic interviews of a wide variety of people designed to lead us this year into developing a system to measure outcomes for clients, as reflected in our grantees work.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Maria.

MS. MERCADO: Vice President Youells, in doing the measurement of outcomes, we are looking at all of the various services that our grantees provide other than just actual case litigation work, is that correct?

MS. YOUELLS: That's correct. And this year, this past year, we actually implemented the Matters Service Reporting System to supplement the case reporting system that actually measures the work that our grantees do, in addition to close cases.

We are all, I believe, acutely aware that when you measure our grantees work by cases closed, you make our work look simple. You make it look as if it can be captured by a number. We all know it cannot, and we are acutely aware of attempting to develop a measurement system that captures all of the work that our grantees do in its entirety.

MS. MERCADO: And that would be collaborative work that we do with other agencies and organizations, or other pro bono providers as well, for legal services provides a significant amount of the work as well, is that correct?

MS. YOUELLS: Absolutely.

MS. MERCADO: Okay.

MS. YOUELLS: Thank you very much.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Thank you. Next on the agenda is "Perspective on GIS Mapping," and that is with the IG office, and then we're going to introduce the panel.

MR. KOCZUR: Thank you. This morning we want to brief you on the mapping evaluation project the OIG conducted with our two Georgia programs. This has been an extremely interesting and educational experience for the OIG, and I think for our grantees in Georgia also.

Mapping involves very complex technology, and producing useful maps has been a challenge. While the challenge has been great, the first phase of the project has been successful. Our goal was to determine the usefulness of maps in helping managers in their strategic and operational planning. This has been achieved.

Mapping is a useful tool for helping managers promote legal services, evaluate access to such services, deploy resources, and manage their programs. Maps allow the visual presentation of data on where clients live, where they receive services, and various other aspects of their -- of the geographical service area represented by the grantees.

Maps present information in a much more persuasive way, as I think you'll see when we put the slide -- than can possibly be done with statistical data shown in charts, graphs, or even in computer spreadsheets.

With that, I would like to introduce Dave Maddox, the Assistant Inspector General for Resource Management, who is responsible for the mapping evaluation and will discuss the project.

MR. MADDOX: Thanks, Len. The goal of this project is producing informed and independent evaluation of how maps can support planners and grantee managers at state, local, and national levels. Other social service agencies work has led us to believe that mapping could offer significant benefits for legal services.

For example, maps can demonstrate the extent of the need for services and support planning efforts to increase access to those services. Maps can measure accomplishments and show the results to others. Leadership can use maps to garner additional program support, promote missions such as equal access to justice, and monitor progress towards achieving the program's goals.

Objects of the evaluation are: To identify prototype maps valuable to legal services decision makers at all levels; show access to legal services, to the extent possible, by mapping poverty in income, populations relative to cases closed; and to produce a recipe that grantees could follow to create maps on their own at reduced costs.

Georgia was selected as the site of this project because it nicely represents both rural and urban service areas, and it is also in the fastest growing part of the south. The two grantees in Georgia actively participated, supplied historical case data, and represented grantees' interest in mapping.

Georgia Legal Services Program or GLSP, led by Executive Director Phyllis Holmen, serves the entire state except for metro Atlanta. The Atlanta Legal Aid Society or ALAS services metro Atlanta and is led by Executive Director Steve Gottlieb.

I would like to thank Ms. Holmen and Mr. Gottlieb for their key and active participation in this project. Unfortunately, neither could join us here in Washington today.

To perform the mapping work, we hired local Georgia contractors: Peachtree Geographics converted the case data to map locations; Jordan Jones & Goulding, an engineering firm, produced the maps; also providing expertise in designing and managing the project was Edward Jurkevics from Chesapeake Analytics, who is here with us today.

In this phase of the mapping evaluation, the OIG found maps to be powerful and credible tools for legal services, and to be useful for planners and grantees to promote their programs, to identify low income populations, to evaluate access to legal services, and to decide how to deploy resources, and tools for state planning and delivery measurement.

Maps create a new visual perspective for making the case for legal services the grantees nor their funders have never seen before. Maps offers a standardized measure of access to legal services in that they provide the numbers and the locations of those who receive legal services, as compared to those who are income-eligible.

Now we'd like to show you some of the maps. Ed?

MR. JURKEVICS: Thanks, Dave. We are going to, in a second, folks, behind you, but let me make a couple of introductory remarks. And I'd like to do that by starting at the end and tell you what are accomplishments were.

First of all, we produced this map book of 132, we hope, professional grade maps here. And each of these maps were evaluated. And other ones that didn't make the book were evaluated for their utility and by both the grantees in Georgia, and the OIG. And we tried to perfect the most valuable of these maps, and while cutting out the ones that were less informative for us.

We developed a set of technical standards and procedures and methods because the hope is that we could take this mapping and in the future we could do it in Wyoming, or New York City, or we could do it from year-to-year, and then the maps could be directly compared and decisions could be made from these maps from different places.

So the hope is that this has a way of being more broadly used. And then, afterwards, the maps, the evaluation, and the lessons learned in the project were captured, and they will be available in a forthcoming final report.

And now if I can draw your attention to the screen, I want to show you some examples of the maps we created. Is everybody comfortable? Is that okay?

A PARTICIPANT: Yeah.

MR. JURKEVICS: The first map we're looking at here today shows the 2000 census poverty distribution across the U.S. with all of the grantees are grants, main and branch offices shown as dots. So that's a main office. Boy, have I got the shakes today. And these are branch offices, the green dots.

And I'd like to accustom you to the color scheme that we used here where the lighter yellow -- as we can see the bar here, the lighter yellows represent lower numbers or lower poverty populations, and the hot are dark colors represent more or greater intensity.

On this map, you'll note -- oops, over here in California, there are 4.7 million persons in poverty, as captured by the 2000 census, about 14 percent of the nation's total. Texas had 3.1 million persons in poverty, while New York state had 2.7.

This map shows the change in state poverty population as a percentage of the national poverty total between the 2000 and 1990 censuses. In an effect, this map shows the changes in the proportion of LSC funding that each state would receive if level funding were appropriated. And we're not taking into account any 19 million that might be added to this. So this is on a level funding scenario.

The yellows here represent increases in funding, while the blues show loss of funding. And what's so striking on this map is this solid patch of blues concentrated mid-continent while the yellows are all on the coasts. And that kind of insight is simply not possible by looking at this data in a table.

North Dakota, here, shows the greatest loss, just over 21 percent, with Iowa a close second, also over 20 percent decline. And on the other side of the equation, we have Nevada here, which gained over 60 percent, I think, almost 62 percent in the 10 year period.

It's not as visible on this map, and often you need more than one map to tell a story here. But of the nation's total increase in about 2 million persons in poverty, California alone accounts for more than half of that number, about 55 percent. And under the level funding scenario then, California would receive or would gain $7 million to reach about $40 million in total in funding.

Now turning to Georgia, which was the focus of our mapping evaluation project, we worked with the Georgia grantees and but about five or six of these maps were done in Georgia.

This map shows the poverty population in that state. And, again, as before, we saw the darker reds mean more persons in poverty. And we can see the concentrations of persons in poverty in urban areas like Augusta here, Savannah, and then this metro Atlanta area.

The area here within the green line, if I can steady my hand, within that green line, that represents the five county service area of ALAS. And the rest of the state, the remaining 154 counties -- and that's what these are, each of these -- there is 159 counties in the state served by GLSP. And they operate these 10 regions.

The regions are defined by these green boundary lines, and out of these 12 regional offices that you see with such way process labeled there. The Piedmont area, which is this service area just around Atlanta, is served under the GLSP headquarters which is located in Atlanta itself.

Now on the right hand side, we show the change between the 1990 and the 2000 census. And, as before, we saw on the national map the yellows and the oranges show increase in poverty population while the blues show a decrease in persons in poverty.

In the ALAS area, which is right in the metro land area, the poverty population increased by 30 percent from 1990 to 2000, a significant increase. And here this red county, that's Gwinnett County, have the most growth, which is they went from 14,000 to 33,000 in the 10 year period, a significant growth.

And this information was used to confirm Mr. Gottlieb's conviction that the Gwinnett office needed to be made in a full-time staffed office, and ALAS provided this map to local judges, lawyers, and community leaders in a local fundraising effort to support that office.

In the rest of the state, outside the ALAS area, the GLSP increase in poverty population was just over six percent in the 10 year period. And at the bottom, you see this is Echols County, it had a lot of growth but it's a fairly low population county. There is about a thousand persons in poverty in that county.

In our opinion, these maps are best looked at together. You sort of need the one to capture what's going on in the other one. And knowing more about the movements or changes in the poverty population is key to an efficient legal services delivery system because it drives things like office locations, and staff resource allocation, and other state-wide planning functions.

Now this map shows the concentrations of income-eligible persons in the state, which is persons falling at or below 125 percent of the poverty line. And about 1.2 million income-eligible persons are in Georgia and are represented on this map.

I'd like you to note that we're using now the 1990 census data because most of our project, you know, it takes some number of years for Census actually to release its census data. For most of our project, only the 1990 census data was available, and the 2000 data wasn't released yet.

The 2000 data has since been released. It was broadly released in about October for this area. Although you have seen so far 2000 data, most of it was done with this 1990 data. So you have a bit of a mismatch in cases and what we're showing the income-eligible persons, albeit, who admit that issue, and it probably needs to go back and update that.

Well, as before, the deeper the red, the higher the density of income-eligible persons. In this white area here, that white area is Fort Stewart and the census doesn't tabulate in the military area there. So that comes out as white, and correctly, from the census perspective.

Now we'd like to look at a close up of the ALAS service area in Atlanta. And, again, now we can see ALAS's six offices that they maintain in the Atlanta area, the green dots there, and also you can see the county lines. So this county that stretches from top to bottom there, that's Fulton County.

Now when you look at the income-eligible persons, they are concentrated inside the parameter in downtown Atlanta in the densest part of the urban areas. You can see these dark red clusters of income-eligible persons.

And Fulton County and DeKalb County together accounted for 210,000 income-eligible persons on this map. And the issue here was that in the past grantees only had tables, you know, aggregated at the county level to show, you know, what the income-eligible were.

They were never able to see where, in fact, the income-eligibles were or show it to anybody else, a funding source to show this is a -- so it's a very practical matter having this kind of information at your disposal.

So now we look at the other side with our cases closed in Georgia, and this represents the cases closed by GLSP. Here the ALAS area is deliberately omitted because we made this map for the use of Ms. Phyllis Holmen. These are cases closed in the five year period from 1996 to 2000. And about 90,000 closed cases are represented on this map. They were closed by GLSP.

Now on the right is the change in cases closed between the two end years, '96 and 2000. And we can note, as you are used to the colors, where the blues are declines, and the yellows and oranges are increases, we know in particular the dramatic increase here in Savannah and in the Macon office.

And we'll get back to that later, as to why those increases were. We had to put together a series of maps, and eventually we got to the bottom of it through this technique.

And the rest of the map generally shows the increases -- if you'll recall where the poverty populations increase, they were either around the urbanized metro areas. And you see just outside the ALAS service area here there is increases.

And you can also see that this Dalton office up here certainly increased its case closure between those two years, as did regions down here in the bottom right.

Now it's important to bear in mind that in this project we weren't evaluating the grantees performance or the performance for its regional offices. We were evaluating mapping as a tool. So we are not -- there is not a comment made upon that. It's the tool. Does this have a utility? That was important to us in this project.

Now digging deeper into the case data that we received, we look at case closures for clients identified as Hispanic again in ALAS service area. There has been a strong growth in Hispanic populations in the Atlanta area. And that poses a language challenge in the provision of legal services -- to Mr. Gottlieb.

And this is reflected in the growth of Hispanic closed cases between 1996, which is this map, and 2000, which is this map. Your eye is drawn to these areas that are -- this will be called a suburban area of Atlanta.

These areas in DeKalb and Cobb County show these growths. And now the maps will toggle back and forth between the two. So you can see the case closure increase. And that's all in this -- these suburban areas. And these maps together demonstrated to Mr. Gottlieb that ALAS is, in fact, penetrating the Hispanic communities.

And you can see from this that mapping would be a valuable tool in validating the results of various outreach and access initiatives in showing how these programs were working, and whether they were reaching the target population. So, you know, we see mapping as a component of various access initiatives.

Now further drilling in, this is the city of Atlanta proper. So Fulton County extends way down, and way up, and the city of Atlanta proper just goes over here into DeKalb County just a little bit.

And Mr. Gottlieb wanted a map just of the city to show city officials and possible funders the level of that ALAS activity within the city limits. The red background was the density of income-eligible persons. As we saw before, you see those very dark areas of income-eligible persons in downtown Atlanta.

And on top, you can just barely see it, it looks like a case of the blue measles is up. There is a blue dot here. They are for every case ALAS closed in the five year period.

And what we were trying to do here is on a map is represent some access measure or some, you know, representation of access. And what you hope is that you'd see the blue dots, you know, cluster, in thicker clusters over the darkest density of income-eligible persons.

And, in fact, I think that's exactly what that map demonstrates. In fact, in some areas here, the blue dots are so thick you can't even see the underlying color.

Now this map is an effort to get around that problem of the case dots obscuring the underlying income-eligible populations. And so, what we see here is the -- again, the GLSP regions with the green outlines here -- and for each one we calculated the cases the office closed in one year per thousand income-eligible persons in the service area.

And the results here range from less than 10 cases in these service areas, Gainesville, Athens, and Augusta, to over 25 here in the Savannah service area. And the colors of these access levels are standardized. And this could be compared from region-to-region, or even indeed you know in a different state.

And we view this as a potentially valuable tool in contributing to the understanding of access, keeping in mind of course that each office has its own, particularly, context and circumstances as to, you know, and the nature of the services that it provides.

Now we're looking at that same access measured here, which is the cases closed per thousand income-eligible persons, but in more detail in the service area of GLSP on the left, and ALAS on the right.

In the GLSP area, a greater level of access is seen in areas like Savannah and in Macon, where you see those oranges. And here it's -- just to put this in perspective -- in this neighborhood here, in Gwinnett County, ALAS closed less than 10 cases per thousand income-eligible in 2000.

Meanwhile, across the county line in this neighborhood here, the service level has over 250 cases closed per thousand. So which begs the question why? And I'm sure that there is, you know, great explanations.

The yellow one might be a big country club, or there is something. But it asks you to look, keep looking into this. And maps like these raise valuable questions about equality of access to services, and questions that are important for legal services managers to pursue. And we feel that they could be used in a broad set of circumstances.

This map of the Macon service area just south of Atlanta shows that same access ratio, and it's about 100 miles from here to here, just to give you a sense. Now, as we zoom in on that, these circles, the concentric circles show the 10, 20, and 30 mile driving distances from the regional office.

And driving distance might be an inhibitor to access for rural clients visiting the office, or for lawyers visiting rural clients. Individual cases closed are shown on the map as dots again. We've got that measle effect where the brief service are these blue dots, and then underneath those are the red dots which represent extended service.

And this map shows that extended legal services are indeed available to rural clients. You'll see there is a good representation of red dots up here towards Dublin.

Now this map has some undercount of rural cases. Because the addresses in that area are often not much more than a P.O. Box or a rural route, and are difficult to place on a map. And we are looking at ways of getting around that.

Now we show you these two maps just to indicate that there is other types of case information can be displayed on a map. On the left, we have the GLSP cases closed and the legal county of family.

And on the right, GLSP wanted to see the distribution of cases supported by Older Americans Act funding to show the extent of its activities under that funding source for the first time.

Now these are littler maps. We'll show you the bottom two in a second. On the left, we have a map of the GLSP on the left here. We have a map of the GLSP regional service areas showing the average cases closed by each attorney in the offices. And the figures range from 125 cases closed per attorney in these service areas to 350 per staff of 30 in these offices.

And as I indicated before, the map on the right shows the reason why. And the map on the right is the PAI, the private attorney involvement map. So it shows the cases closed by PAI.

And you'll see here that, in fact, the Savannah, and the Macon offices have very active PAI programs which has contributed to higher case closure rate, and has shown up in the higher level of service on several occasions for those service areas.

Now on the lower right, I'll ask you to draw your attention to the map on the right hand side. We show the number of attorneys for a thousand income-eligible persons, slightly a different measure than on the top.

In here, the Dalton and the Valdosta regions have a ratio of seven attorneys per 100,000 income-eligible persons. That's over 14,000 income-eligible persons per attorney.

And maps like this really visually convey a lot of program information, and they indeed show just how resource-constrained this legal services field really is -- for one person to be handling 14,000 income-eligibles is quite a task.

Now we're stepping back. As we have drawn to a close, mercifully, we are stepping back to the national perspective. And we see the LSC documented cases closed by state in the five year-period, 1996 to 2000, and there is over 6 million.

I think it's 6.2 million cases closed represented on this map. It's a real great accomplishment. And, as expected, California here leads with almost 750,000 cases, followed by Texas, New York, Michigan, and Florida, each in the 300,000 range; Illinois just behind that, over 250,000 cases closed.

And then you'll recall that access measure that we developed which were the cases closed per thousand income-eligible persons. And for the nation as a whole we mapped out on a state-by-state basis and here is the result.

There is a number of observations that are possible here. First, there is Nevada. And in Nevada, there were less than six cases per thousand income-eligible persons closed in 2000. And remember that Nevada had the highest growth rate in poverty population, over 60 percent.

But its resources were back from the 1990 census and 2000 still. So while it has had this great growth, we have seen this low proportion of cases closed per income-eligible in 2000.

Now, at the other end, we have Iowa right here. In Iowa, we are over 60 cases per thousand income-eligible persons were closed in 2000. So that means that between Iowa and Nevada that Iowa had 10 times greater cases closed than Nevada.

And just a brief closing or remark, the maps you have seen here today are only a small number of what we have produced. I think they pretty reasonably represent the potential of mapping for legal services. And I'd like to turn it back to Dave.

MR. MADDOX: Okay. Ed, thank you for that presentation. A summary of Ms. Holmen's and Mr. Gottlieb's comments have been provided in your board book. You will find them on --

Well, the OIG project summary starts right after page 35 in your board books, and their comments are provided on page 7 of that section. A comprehensive report including lessons learned, the maps, and an analysis of how the maps can be used as a management support tool to improve services will be released shortly.

At this point, I'll turn it back to Len.

MR. KOCZUR: I thank you for your attention. I'm not sure how much time we have left. But I think we can take a question or two, if you have any.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Maria.

MS. MERCADO: You had mentioned that the majority of this mapping that you did was not based on the 2000 census. Are you going to update that, so that we have a more accurate reflection of actually the poverty count, and the resources available, and the delivery of legal services, and the different programs?

MR. KOCZUR: Both the Georgia grantees have indicated some interest in using the 2000 census data to produce maps. And, yes, we're looking at doing that. I think it's pretty certain we'll move in that direction and produce that map.

MS. MERCADO: Well, I mean, because it would make -- both for services of funding, for services of where it is that you should allocate your resources, the few resources you have, and, of course, also for fundraising in those local states.

MR. KOCZUR: Yeah.

MS. MERCADO: In figuring out where the -- because, as you say, the population shifts. Even in your own mapping from --

MR. KOCZUR: Yes.

MS. MERCADO: -- '90 to '96, and so then we need to have more accurate account. I mean I am sure that the programs themselves have an idea of where it is, but sometimes it's better if you have the documentation and the data.

MR. KOCZUR: Yeah, certainly. As I said, we'll be working with the Georgia program. I think one thing the maps show also is that with our funding based on 10 year old data, it creates a real disparity, as indicated in Nevada and Iowa.

So I think perhaps this board or the next board might give some consideration to a legislative objective of adopting a different type that we could update during the 10 years. The census produces a number of reports on population.

There might be a better way of distributing the funds rather than waiting for 10 years; and, of course, as we have the problem this year with a big reduction for certain programs, for certain states, so that we might be able to solve that through a change in the law allowing adjustment through the 10 year census period.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Edna.

MS. FAIRBANKS-WILLIAMS: You referring to private attorney involvement, now this is the private attorney involvement that you sent a case to them.

Was there money paid to them adjudicary, or did they do it pro bono?

Did you count both kinds or just one kind?

MR. KOCZUR: Yes, we counted whatever the Georgia program -- in that case, Georgia Legal Services, counted as a PAI case. So we used their data. We did not modify it or adjust it in any way. The data they would use to manage their program, that's what we used for the mapping.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Bill.

MR. McCALPIN: I wonder what was the cost of this exercise, and recognizing that the first time around costs more?

What would you expect it would cost to do this sort of thing in another state now?

MR. KOCZUR: We originally budgeted $200,000 for the project. We spent about 160,000 on doing the Georgia phase of it. We have a plan to spend -- to expand the project. We're talking with some other grantees over the next two years is spending approximately $380,000.

MR. McCALPIN: Per state?

MR. KOCZUR: Well, no, that's over -- we would do another state. Hopefully, we have been talking with the California grantees. But, eventually, we would like to develop a program -- which is more than a program -- a process by which the grantees could create their own maps, and we would put it on the Internet, or on either our site or the LSC sites where they could go.

There would be a series of standard maps that they could produce that we would think getting grantee input that all grantees would be interested in, as well as the ability to customize maps. And once we reach that point, then the creation of individual map grants -- maps by an individual grantee would be relatively inexpensive.

MR. EAKELEY: I just -- I want to remind all of us that when we experienced the first flush of results from the technology initiative, the Office of the Inspector General was encouraged to remember the, not always clear, dividing line between the programmatic responsibilities of the corporation and its management, and the OIG's consultative advice and counsel.

What you have just said in response to Mr. McCalpin suggests that you may be approaching the line of programmatic initiatives. And I'd just encourage you to coordinate with the president of the corporation, and the vice president of programs on that.

MR. KOCZUR: Certainly, we would do that. And it's not our objective to run this program long-term. At some point, hopefully, the corporation would see the value. We would prove the value, and the corporation would agree, and would take over the program. We don't intend to do this type of work indefinitely.

MR. EAKELEY: Well, we don't have to explore it here, but I feel nervous when the IG says he's going to run a program. But, in any event, we don't need to take up the time in this meeting on that.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Since you -- Bucky.

MR. ASKEW: Thanks. This is very interesting, probably more so to Mr. Strickland and myself than anybody else in the room, but very interesting stuff.

I'm curious. As you said, Ed, I think, this frequently raises questions, it doesn't necessarily provide answers to anything, but it does raise a lot of questions.

My understanding, Len, is this was developed in hopes that it could be a management tool for programs. And I can see the value of that from just what you showed us today, how a program director or staff could look at this and begin asking a lot of questions, or maybe using it to make some programmatic decisions.

I'm wondering if you see a value of it to the corporation beyond legislative value, in terms of demonstrating to Congress what we're doing, but, beyond that, if there is a value to the staff of the corporation in using these maps?

MR. KOCZUR: I think there is some potential in the future, as we move towards the outcome evaluation, that kind of thing, that maps could be useful.

But, yeah, I would hate to get in a situation where maps were used as a punitive saying, "This program closed 5,000 cases per attorney, and the other one only did 300. So it's a good versus bad."

I don't think -- I don't see it going that way. But it would raise questions for our -- for the management to say, "Well, why did this occur?" In a lot of cases, there is a very good reason for it.

But, yes, I see that it does have value. It should value in the long-term for the management. And, as I indicated, we are coordinating with the management, with Glenn and Michael, as we go along on this.

MR. ASKEW: Good.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: We want to kind of go into the next panel. We'll take three more questions.

MS. BATTLE: I just wanted to follow up on Mr. McCalpin's question about the 380 in the next phase, and what specifically in addition to California you intended to do?

MR. EAKELEY: Let the record reflect that Justice Broderick has just returned to the court after a long absence.

(Applause.)

MR. EAKELEY: The record should also reflect he is looking even younger than before.

MR. BRODERICK: Well, I just want to say, as my uncle said to me in July, he said, "John, you look better than you did before." I said, "I can't take that as a compliment."

But anyway, I didn't mean to make a stage entrance. I was away, but I cannot tell you, my board members, and those of you who are here, how much I have missed being here. And good luck.

MR. EAKELEY: Great to see you.

MR. BRODERICK: I'm sorry to interrupt the presentation. Great to be back.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: It was welcome. I have forgotten where we were. Are we ready? We can go into the next panel if all questions --

MR. KOCZUR: I need to address the question.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Yeah, was someone answering your question?

MR. KOCZUR: Of course, the California project will be -- will take some of those funds. We would hope at the end of that project we would be able to have a standard process that could be placed on the internet, again, working with management, that the grantees could use -- could make their own maps. That's our ultimate objective.

MS. BATTLE: Okay.

MR. KOCZUR: So -- and at that time, they would be -- that would be relatively inexpensive, and I don't have cost figures on that. But it's something that we would hope would be repeatable, and the grantees could use on their own without a lot of technical support.

MS. BATTLE: Okay, thank you.

MS. MERCADO: And just a follow-up to that, it would seem that even in the proposed program that you want to do for California that a bulk of your costs could already be decreased by the existing mapping.

As far as the raw data on poverty populations and sheer populations -- not as to the actual cases closed by those grantees or actual clients served by those grantees, obviously, that's very specific data that the grantees that wouldn't necessarily be available to the general population.

But all of the other mappings now currently exist that have been put out in the 2000 census. And it actually isn't the Office of the Census Bureau that produced them.

I want to say that it's the Department of Agriculture, but I'm not sure, that already has these mappings, and maybe that might reduce the costs to some extent.

MR. KOCZUR: Yeah, and certainly the lessons we have learned in this first, we have had quite learning curve -- really technical. And I think it will certainly be less expensive the second time.

MS. MERCADO: Thank you.

MR. KOCZUR: Thank you.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Okay. There being no other questions --

MR. KOCZUR: If you have additional questions, Ed and Dave will be around for most of the morning, anyway.

MR. EAKELEY: Thank you, very nice job.

MS. MERCADO: Thank you.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Next is the report by Michael Genz and Glenn Rawdon.

MR. RAWDON: Good morning. Mike has deferred to let me do the presentation here by myself. What we are going to brief you on very briefly is the involvement of the technology section of the programs on what we have been doing on mapping as it coordinates with what you just heard from the IG's office.

And you have many other presentations today that are much more scintillating than perhaps this one is going to be. So I have been asked to be fairly brief. So instead of doing this live presentation that I had, I have passed it out and it should be in front of each of you.

I know that you just won't be able to tear yourselves away from the discussion in here on spacial locations and digitizing polygon themes. I did want to share another kind of light-hearted moment I had this week as I was working on the DTD for the XML CMS.

I was asked what the TLA was for a certain term and I said, "TLA?" And they said, "Yes, the three letter acronym." So I want you to know that we now have an acronym for acronyms.

We had a small grant that we did this year, as one of the TIG projects with Orange County, to work on kind of an overview in education of mapping for projects managing attorneys for anyone within legal services that would really like to learn more about what this tool is, so that they can see how they might be able to utilize it in their program as a management tool, as an access issue.

Mike and I, and Randi, and other staff have worked very closely with the IG to be briefed on this, to see what they're doing, and to see the potential for this with our programs. So we did this small grant in last year's TIG grant, and what you'll see before you is an overview of the presentation that we're preparing for the grantees.

Now what we have done is we had a focus group in southern California back in November -- I think it was late in November, or early in December -- where we had all the project directors from the three programs, or staff at least, from the three programs in southern California, plus San Diego, and Inland County come in and look at the presentation.

The presentation was put together by Kristin Kerwin, who is with Carnegie Mellon University, and George Teata, who is also with California University at Irvine. They have been worked with Bob Cohen for a long time.

Bob was one of the first directors that I know of to actually use mapping to help him identify underserved populations in his area. And so, Bob was the logical choice to start putting together these education materials.

What we're going to do is as soon as the changes are made -- and you'll notice the later slides talk about changes that were suggested, or are going to be incorporated from the focus group.

We wanted to present what is actually useful. So that's why we did a sample presentation and are making changes. Once that's done, we will make this available through some online trainings, and some personal trainings that we're doing.

If you remember, we had another grant this last year for technical skills training for people in technology that were going to be using many of the electronic media that we've set up including legal meetings, another grant that we did n Lone Star Legal Services, so that online or in-person project grantors will be able to start getting an overview and learning about mapping.

Now one other thing that we've done -- and we talked to you a little bit about the XML grant, and I promise not to say XML too many times. I'm already over the limit.

So to remind you, we use XML so that different databases can talk to each other, so that we define terms, and then that way when one program needs to communicate with another, and they have called last name, L name, and the other program is called last name, last name, they will know what they're talking about.

This is going to be very important to mapping. We will be able to use these XML tools with the tools that the IG is talking about developing, so that our grantees will be able to take information for their case management systems whatever information they want to map, and then use it with any mapping tools that are created so that they will be able to communicate with each without a lot of this work going on.

As you pointed out quite -- you know, you observed here very well, it is expensive when you start doing this, and the things that you begin to learn. But with the tools that we have been planning for with the TIG grants, we hope to be poised to be able to take advantage of anything that the IG comes up with, so that without a lot of expense this will be made available to our grantees, so that if they want to use it, and after the education if they see the value they'll be able to use these tools.

But, certainly, nothing that we're doing here is going to make the grantees do any type of mapping. We're just simply giving them the tools so that if they want to do this, they'll be able to. And so, that's what we've been doing so far to be ready to do -- to link in with what the OIG has been doing, so that the programs will be able to take advantage of it.

MR. ASKEW: Glen, other than Bob Cohen, what have you perceived the level of interest to be among program directors in this sort of thing because I assume there is a cost to this?

And in doing a cost benefit analysis with their limited funding, what do you think their interests would be in doing this?

MR. RAWDON: Bucky, as they have been exposed to what they can get out of it, I have seen a lot of interest. I know particularly the focus group that we had in southern California, the report I got back from them was they were very enthusiastic about what they could learn from this.

We have all looked at charts and graphs. And one of the slides in here just shows you a whole bunch of numbers on a page. And that's not very interesting to anybody.

Another thing that they might -- that I have heard interest from is for fundraising. Because if they can go in and show, like what the map has showed you of Atlanta, if they can show how they're covering Atlanta -- but they have got areas that they're not able to reach because of funding.

They can go to funders like local United Ways and say, "We've got a lot of need here in this area," or they might be able to go to some members of the Hispanic community and say, "We had an underserved here. We need more funding for this." If you can see it on a map, it's much easier to show them than if you show them an Excel spreadsheet.

So I have seen a lot of interest from people as they have begun to learn about it. We had a presentation at the TIG conference in Chicago on mapping, and I got lots of people coming up to me commenting and asking questions about what we were doing on that so.

MR. EAKELEY: Was that presentation in English?

MR. RAWDON: Yes.

MS. BATTLE: It had subscripts for us.

MR. ASKEW: What does the TOA and GIS stand for?

MR. RAWDON: It's the Geographical Information Systems. You don't want to hear about digitizing polygons?

MS. BATTLE: But to follow up to Bucky's question of Len just before, is the corporation doing anything to look at ways of using mapping at the level of the corporation?

MR. RAWDON: There has been some discussion on that. But, as far as -- I mean and Randi would be better qualified to answer that than I. But I don't know of any current initiative that we have right now to do this on a global scale.

MR. EAKELEY: It seems to me we're spending corporation resources developing tools for grantees that could also be used to facilitate management decision-making. So I think we ought to at least keep an open mind about the possibilities represented by this.

MR. RAWDON: And I also see for the state planning body this to be valuable.

MR. EAKELEY: Sure.

MR. RAWDON: Not just individual programs --

MR. EAKELEY: Absolutely.

MR. RAWDON: -- that as we go into a state planning group, they should be looking at maps like this as they come up with their plan for the state justice community.

MR. ASKEW: My question was directed actually more as a warning than a -- that you could use a map to draw conclusions that are inappropriate. And that was my concern. We can say Iowa is doing a bang up job, and Nevada is doing a disastrous job based on this amount.

And yet there are thousands of reasons why those numbers are what they are. And so I am saying these raise lots of questions that are very useful from a management perspective, but they may not give you answers from a compliance perspective or an evaluation perspective, that sort of thing. And I think Glenn addressed that pretty nicely, so I didn't --

MR. RAWDON: And that's the other thing, Bucky, is that these show you the questions. They don't give you the answers. That still takes the project directors, the staff, and everybody analyzing it. Because just like they showed on that one map, this one area, they had the PAI involvement.

Now maybe what that tells you is you want to come in and see if you can encourage PAI involvement in other places because it's a very effective tool for improving access. But it doesn't tell you if you just look at the map why that's happening.

MR. EAKELEY: That is worth raising those questions.

A PARTICIPANT: Oh, yeah.

MR. RAWDON: Oh, yes. I mean that's why we're doing this, is because we want project directors to be able to see what the questions are, so they can be addressed.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Okay. There are no more questions. We'll go into the state planning evaluation. That's the next --

MR. RAWDON: Thank you.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: -- panel by Bob Gross.

MR. GROSS: Neal, this is Bob Gross. And we're about to begin this panel.

MR. DUDOVITZ: Okay.

MR. GROSS: And I'm going to introduce it, and we'll start from there. This is -- the board just heard a presentation of mapping software, and how it's being used for evaluation. Now you're going to hear about a little different kind of evaluation.

As you know, about a year ago, we began to develop our state planning evaluation instrument that would answer two basic questions about state planning: How are we doing? And since, as a community, we clearly have not achieved equal justice, how can we do better?

And when I say "we," I mean LSC, each state justice community, and our entire community. So how are we doing? How can we do better?

Those are easy questions, not so simple to figure out how to ask them, particularly, if you refine them a bit and ask:

How can we obtain a clear understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of a particular state justice community?

How can we access what is going on in the state justice community at a specific time and place such that we are able to establish a baseline against which we can assess and measure improvement over time?

How can we measure the performance of a specific state justice community now and in the future, so that we'll be able to attain a clear picture in the aggregate of what is going on nationally?

You can see why I prefer the shorthand; how are we doing and how we can do better. Recognizing the challenge of translating that into action, we sought and obtained the help of a consultant, John Greacen, who has extensive experience in these matters.

And to make sure that what we did was relevant and useful to the state justice communities, we invited and assembled a panel of 11 people from across the country, representatives of LSC and non-LSC programs, the ABA, the courts, nationally-laden Defender Association, and academia, three of whom are -- well, two of whom are here today, a live one by phone.

I'll introduce them in a moment. As you know, over the last 10 months that team held four in-person meetings and went through six drafts of the instrument. We circulated the sixth draft for comment; and in November, in Milwaukee at the NLADA Conference, took oral comments.

We then convened again, and incorporated the comments, and produced what is now our seventh draft. And, as we speak, it is being tested in Kentucky. And three weeks ago, it was tested in Washington state for a full week, which is why we have -- and Neal Dudovitz was a part of that testing team, which is why he is staying in California today and not traveling here.

Today, it's my pleasure to introduce three members of the design team, who attended all of those meetings, and for whose effort we are very grateful. I'll start with Neal.

As you know, you got a chance to hear about the work that Neal and his colleagues and partners are doing in the LA Basin at the last board meeting. Neal is executive director of Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County.

He has spent his entire 29 year legal career as a public interest lawyer. He has been the executive director of Neighborhood Legal Services for about 10 years. The program employs 40 lawyers with a budget of approximately $7 million. It quite obviously brings tremendous experience to the legal services community.

Bob Clyde is the executive director of Ohio Legal Assistance foundation. Many of you will remember Bob's address in San Francisco, where he talked about the successful state planning that was going on in Ohio.

Bob administers -- and I hope it's still approximately $15 million to IOLTA and filing fee funding. And the organization, Ohio Legal Assistance Foundation, OLAF, is one of the handful of such organizations around the country that conducts regular on-site peer reviews of its grantee programs.

Bob has a long background in civil legal services. Prior to becoming the executive director of OLAF, he was a staff attorney with, and then the executive director of Northeast Ohio Legal Services in Youngstown.

He was part of the founding of OLAF, and was hired as its first executive director in 1994. He has clearly played a key role in convening and leading Ohio's planning as a recognized national leader, having served as president of the National Association of IOLTA Programs, and on NLADA's civil council.

Our third panelist, Judge Juanita Bing Newton, is an extraordinary individual.

(Applause.)

MR. GROSS: You can hear the applause from up and down the East Coast. She deserves it.

(Laughter.)

MR. GROSS: For the past three-and-a-half years, she has served as New York's Deputy Chief Administrative Judge for Justice Initiatives. This special high level post was created to bring to statewide leadership and coordination to the challenge of ensuring meaningful access to the New York justice system.

Now, as if that weren't enough, 11 days ago she was also, and I emphasize also, appointed administrative judge of the New York City Criminal Courts, which is probably, if not the, it's one of the busiest criminal courts in the country. And I can't thank her enough for coming here today.

Her resume is full of so many accomplishments, it would take a long time. But, as a trial judge, membership with the State Commission on Professional Conduct, New York State Violence Against Women Advisory Board, Judicial Committee on Women in the Courts, founding member of the Franklin Williams Judicial Commission on Minorities in the Courts.

And if that weren't enough, while she was donating her time to our state planning evaluation meetings, she also somehow found time to play a very effective, vital role in New York's revised state planning process.

She has brought so much need perspective, experience, and leadership to that body. And I was very happy to hear that she is going to continue to head up the court's justice initiatives and bring her gifts to the civil justice community.

These panels will first talk -- Neal will first talk about the experience from the test in Washington state, his observations. And the other two panels will talk about their experiences in giving -- getting this instrument to where it is today, and their hopes for the future.

So, with that, Neal.

MR. DUDOVITZ: Okay. Thank you, Bob. I guess first I just want to echo some of Bob's comments about the challenge of this endeavor. And one of the reasons I have been really happy to participate is I have really found it to be an interesting endeavor to try and take -- put in the paper in a format that will work, an instrument that will bring forth in finding information we all would like to get about what happened with the legal services program, how they effect the civil justice system.

So it's been a very interesting and actually enjoyable experience. I was fortunate I think to be able to be one of the test evaluators when we went out to the state of Washington, which was the first week of January.

There were four test evaluators. Three of us, myself, John Greacen, the consultant for the project, and Colleen Kotter, have all participated in the team, and Ken Watson as a LSC staff person.

We spent five days in Washington. I interviewed more than like 70 people ranging from legal services lawyers, judges, members of the private bar, people affiliated with pro bono program.

We interviewed people, we traveled. I think we were in Spokane, and Olympia, and visited Seattle, and really had an opportunity to examine what was going on in the state, and how they were addressing the state justice planning initiative.

I think in the test was, in my personal view, highly successful, in that I think it was clear to us that all the work we had done in putting together the instrument, and the focus of the instrument provided for all the evaluators of the framework that allowed us to feel that we could understand what was going on in Washington.

We could understand the extraordinary success they have had in some areas such as working with the judiciary and working with legal services program. And we could get some sense of areas where we thought the planning could improve, and it could make the system even better.

And what was really encouraging to us is that all of the evaluators I think were able to see the similar issues quite early in the process, so I think we were really encouraged that we were able to focus pretty effectively.

At the conclusion of the TIG, at the request of the Washington Access to Justice Committee, we provided them some general feedback to give them some sense of what the evaluators concluded, and also to get a better idea, based on their reaction, as to whether or not we were really hitting the mark.

And I think that was probably the best part of the evaluation test because it was clear from the -- that the state people agreed that evaluators had accurately seen what was going on in Washington and were really, I think, grateful for our sharing our ideas about things they might do to improve the system.

So I found that that really turned out to be, in my view, a positive experience, a classic experience from our perspective as in the design team. And I think from LSC's perspective, I think we determined from the Washington experience that it's possible to do this, and to get a really fair assessment of what's happening, build the baseline.

And, at the same time, from the state's perspective, you get somebody coming in a little from the outside, who can help them in assessing where there is strength, and help them in assessing places where they can make adjustments and approve, and in that sense help us all.

I know they are in the process of doing another evaluation in Kentucky, and we'll have to get together and compare the results. And we'll see that there are certainly things that need to be done to sort of fix the instrument.

There were some -- though I was one of the people who helped write the instrument. There were sometimes when we tried to use it, we had to ask ourselves, "Who put that word in there? It doesn't make any sense," and even though we were the people who wrote it.

And there is no question that we do have to accept we have to do a little bit of work on the methodology of the evaluation. It was an extensive amount of time that was put into Washington, recognizing that this was a test.

Nevertheless, I think -- you know, my personal view is for this to work for LSC, we have to make sure that the methodology is one that is not too labor-intensive, or it could just be too costly for LSC to conduct this type of evaluation.

MR. GROSS: Thank you, Neal.

MR. DUDOVITZ: That's all that I have at this point. Unless people have questions, do you want to move on and have Bob and the judge speak?

MR. GROSS: Unless there are some burning questions, we can turn to Bob Clyde first.

MR. CLYDE: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I want to say, first of all, that we are in Ohio believers in -- strong believers in the state planning process, and a lot that has come out of the planning process.

And I think the last time I spoke to you, as Bob mentioned, in San Francisco was about what we had done in the way of reconfiguration, and what had resulted in the way of the collaborations that were created out of that reconfiguration, all of which came out of the state planning process.

And I am still enthusiastic, I am still a booster. I think that we have had very positive outcomes. It came at a time that when we were doing evaluations, as Bob mentioned, it was the first round of evaluations that Ohio had done and our foundation was doing.

They were pretty comprehensive peer review visits, a little bit like what has just been described happened in Washington, evaluating Washington as a state system. But we were then evaluating our grantees on an individual grantee basis.

And before reconfiguration had occurred, there were 16 LSC and 3 non-LSC grantees in our state. So it was quite a process for us to get through all of that. As planning occurred and we moved forward into our second round of evaluations in Ohio, we began to evaluate on a regional basis where we had collaborating programs; that is, LSC and non-LSC programs serving a region in a collaborative fashion.

And that was probably something that was born out of the experience of reconfiguration. And I think where we're going next will be to try to do these regional evaluations in a way that we have a total state system evaluation process going on, so that we're not looking just at regional boundaries, but we're looking at what the entire state planning process has tried to accomplish vis-a-vis in the regional evaluations and what we are hoping to get out of this on a statewide basis.

So I want to say that I was in enthusiastic participant in the design team process. I saw that as a natural tie in to what we're doing in Ohio. And I hope that we can partner with LSC, not only in the development of the design for the instrument that's being used which, by the way, I want to say parenthetically is a much, much more objective instrument that anything that we have used in our evaluations in Ohio.

In fact, we started doing evaluations in Ohio kind of loosely using the ABA standards for delivery, which are very old. And they are also kind of very loose. So you can -- you have a very wide variance in the kinds of delivery in each of the programs.

But, nonetheless, you're looking at the performance of the programs. It's a little bit like I think one of Ohio's famous Justice's, Potter Stewart, I believe, is the one who said that he would know obscenity when he saw it.

And we felt that we would know quality when we saw it. But we didn't have a lot of objective standards to go by. And I saw in the development of the design team's evaluation instrument, a product that appeared to have significant objectivity built into it.

And I am hopeful, as I hear the results coming out of Washington and Kentucky, I'm hopeful that Ohio will benefit from that as we go through this process of our own evaluations.

Just a little bit about my participation in the design process, it was one of the most exhaustive processes that I have ever been involved in -- at times, tedious, but nonetheless important as we tried to develop this objective instrument.

And I want to compliment Bob, and Mike, and Randi, and John Greacen. I think it was a wise choice. I think that the guy is incredibly good, has been very effective in marshaling all of this stuff together. And I am actually -- I think the programs in Ohio are not afraid.

I know this has not been a universally accepted process throughout the country. And I know there is a lot still going on in the way of refining the instrument and the process.

But the Ohio programs are actually looking forward to the visit, and I think feel that they have a lot to offer and show what they have been able to accomplish through the state planning process.

I am guessing that that may be why I was asked to appear here today, not that this was one of the more scintillating programs that Glenn referred to in his comments before but.

MS. MERCADO: Yeah, I had better ask the question before I forget, but --

MR. McCALPIN: Well, you're not old enough to have senior moments.

MS. MERCADO: I have senior moments. That's precisely why I'm asking the question now, because I was trying to recollect in my mind whether or not I had ever reviewed this instrument, evaluation instrument that you're talking about, and I can't recall having seen in any of the materials that I have received.

Now was that an oversight, or have I actually not seen it? I mean I really haven't gone senile have I?

MR. GROSS: No, it's been circulating as it's been proceeding.

MS. MERCADO: Well, the different commentaries that we submitted to you, so what is the final product?

What is the final product look like?

MR. EAKELEY: We're only in the seventh draft, Maria.

MS. MERCADO: No, no. No, I mean the final one. What was the final one? I haven't seen that.

MR. CLYDE: As I understand it, there is not a final product.

MS. MERCADO: Okay.

MR. CLYDE: And it's still being developed as they do the visits in Washington and Kentucky.

MR. GROSS: I believe we distributed it at the last -- I'm talking about the last time I presented. I'm not sure which number draft that was. And I believe we have sent draft seven around. Draft six, of course, was put on the internet for a wide --

MS. MERCADO: Yeah, I saw that.

MR. DUDOVITZ: Bob, this is Neal. I believe we decided not to publicly distribute the seventh draft. Because although it's the one we used for the test, we recognized after the actual test we were going to refine it again.

And so, rather than keep introducing new drafts publicly with different views, we decided to wait until after the test to publicly distribute the next draft.

MS. MERCADO: I have been vindicated. Thank you.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Do you have another question, Bob?

MR. GROSS: Judge Bing Newton.

JUDGE NEWTON: Okay. Good morning, Madam Chairlady, and members. It's a pleasure to join you this morning. Like the board member, I like to say what I have to say as soon as I think about it, because I, too, forget.

So let me echo Bob's sentiment that it's been an extraordinary pleasure working with Randi, and Bob, and Mike, and John Greacen. It has been labor-intensive, but well worth it.

It was an opportunity for me to learn something new every day about this process. And it's a pleasure to give you a judicial perspective to state planning. I listened to Bob carefully, and I had a different question to his who and what was the role of the judiciaries. "Why am I here at these meetings?"

Let me tell you my -- if I can, take you back to the first meeting of the design team where I was invited, as we marched on the road to the infamous draft seven, which I think is going to be a lucky draft seven.

I asked what -- I sat at the table with these fabulous, intelligent people. And you can tell because you know Bob, and you heard Neal, and double Bob, how important they are. And I was mesmerized and impressed by the passion, their expertise, and mostly of the lingo of my new partners in state planning.

I was also quite lost. Client-centeredness, I questioned to myself, "Is that really a word?" Increasing capacities, I said, "I'd have to find my own griot," as you know, as an African oral historian, to tell me, "What were these people talking about?"

We had laborious conversations about turf wars. And I said, "Ah-ha, something that I, too, know about." It was a slow process. But after a time, the dialogue and exchange was important. It was indeed client-centered. And under the wonderful, masterful, and demanding leadership of John Greacen, a new focus developed.

And I realized, most importantly, that the judiciary in fact had an important role to play in the development of state planning for the benefit of those least among us. The great beauty of this instrument, whether draft six or seven, is that you get double what you paid for it in my opinion.

Its versatility and its breadth of information makes it not only a valuable tool for the Legal Services Corporation to do that outcomes evaluation that you of necessity must be concerned about, but for those of us in states like New York where we are still in the process of developing an appropriate state plan for low income New Yorkers, it provides almost a blueprint-like device for us to make sure that we test and consider all of the issues that must be addressed in order to have a coordinating effective program to serve those least among us.

And so, it's a product that, even in its draft form, has utility and information, and I take it back to my partners in New York as an instrument for us to use.

Three years ago, when the chief judge asked me to take on a newly created position in New York State of Deputy Chief Administrative Judge for Justice Initiative, she told me that there were certain things that she wanted me to do, and ways that she wanted me to proceed, but then gave me carte blanche to do so.

There was an insistence on my part, and a recognition on hers, that this position had to be at the highest level of our state organization of the judiciary -- that I answer directly to her and to our chief administrative judge -- and furthermore, that the other administrative judges throughout the state, that I had a capacity to affect their operations and to work with them towards a better justice community for those least among us, for low income New Yorkers.

She asked us to focus on legal services and criminal indigent funding, on planning, on the issues of pro se litigants in developing an increased pro bono plan, and public education and outreach, so that the public understands the importance of the work that the legal services community does, and the importance of what it provides.

We were not only concerned with issues of fairness in access, although those are monumental issues in and of themselves, but we also have a business to run.

We had the business of processing cases. And controversies is an expensive one and can be a tedious one, and we were concerned about how issues relating to legal services, particularly, inadequate funding, inadequate numbers of attorneys, and the like, affected our daily operation.

There has, as you know, been an explosion of civil cases in New York. In 2002, in New York City alone there were over 325,000 filings in the civil court which we call our "poor people's court."

And, in addition, there were 375,000 filings in housing court, which we count separately. So that's almost three-quarters of a million filings in cases involving issues that are life affecting: housing, services, bad consumer contracts, and the like.

This is a 65 percent increase over the last decade. Many appear in civil courts without attorneys. And the majority of those who appear in our housing court in New York City in proceedings for eviction, 85 percent of them appear without counsel -- not, I submit, by choice.

We are doing a pro se study right now, and we're asking the litigants, "Why do you come without an attorney?" And it's been a very interesting experience. And this is so we can provide them with the services they need.

The numbers are similar. Outside of New York City and the rest of state, with a particular increase in housing matters in rural New York. And, of course, rural delivery issues are important.

We understand in the judiciary that the dollars are limited after 9/11, and even more difficult now. Our offices, our administrative offices, are one block from the stock exchange and six blocks from the World Trade Center.

And so I see on a daily basis the continuing emotional and now fiscal fallout from the tenor of the attacks and from the falling markets. So we recognize that there is even a greater need for adequate funding, but also a greater need for collaboration of the state justice community.

On 9/11, most of us in the justice community in New York State were not in the city of New York, but at an Access to Justice Conference which the judiciary held to begin to address this issue of how we can be better partners.

We have continued from that point. We continue now, and the effect will be in New York State with the draft seven wonderful instrument that we will, with your assistance, with your help, with monies, with attorneys willing to do work, with judges who want to better understand the plight of the poor, and the operational needs of legal services that we will produce a system that is in fact client-centered with increased capacities without turf wars for the benefit of those in need of legal services. It's an instrument that you can be proud of.

Thank you for permitting me the pleasure of joining you in this wonderful endeavor. I have worked mostly on the criminal side. But I always credit the passion of legal services providers with keeping me in law school. When I started 31 years ago here in the District of Columbia Law School, after the first year I said, "Why would anybody want to do this?"

And then I worked that summer with the Legal Aid Society in my hometown which is Bronx, New York, in my community, a poor community, and then I knew that there was nothing else I ever wanted to do than be a part of a system that really recognized justice for all is meaningless unless it's available for everyone. Thank you.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Thank you.

(Applause.)

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Is that the end of that, Bob?

We'd like a -- if there is no questions, a 10 minutes break here.

MR. EAKELEY: A couple, just a comment and a question. First, I want to thank the -- is it a panel? Is it a committee? The panel is presenting, but the study group that developed the instrument.

MR. GROSS: You can call it the design team.

MR. EAKELEY: Just the design team. This really was a monumental effort, and it took a lot of dedication to produce anything of meaningful nature. But I think this sounds like it is very promising, and I just wanted to record our appreciation for that effort and the contribution of the instrument.

Comment or question, maybe I was looking at it from too much of a distance. But it seemed to me that the effort that the design team put into the instrument was also commensurate with the effort that Washington state had to undertake in order to respond to the first test.

And I'm wondering whether Neal or anyone else might want to comment upon the user-friendliness or unfriendliness of the instrument from a recipient's vantage point. I know Bob -- Neal said that it was received well at the end.

But are there ways to minimize the amount of time and effort that has to go into it before getting a meaningful result?

MR. DUDOVITZ: I'd be happy to try to address that. Let me first say that people in Washington were enthusiastic participants. They really welcomed both the opportunity to show us what they had been doing, and at the same time were interested in getting help in areas where they needed it so, and they certainly devoted a considerable amount of time to the process.

I think that my own judgement is that there are probably ways to do the evaluation effectively, and require less time of the state people than they actually did in Washington. Obviously, the first time around, we were a little clumsy.

And I think, for example, I think we interviewed way more -- far too many people than we needed to give the information that was required. Out of all of the data, all of the people we talked to, there was no one we talked to who felt that it was an imposition to talk with us about what was going on in the state, and that included people who were part of the Legal Services Corporation budget program.

It included private bar people; it included judges. Everybody was really happy to talk with us. And we sort of asked questions about the people we interviewed, as to how they felt about our business meeting and whether it was really hard for them to help to, you know, come an interview. And we never had anybody complain in any way about the process.

And the other thing I will add about this -- and, obviously, this is an important question in the legal services community is to how much time this is all taking. I think the process was a valuable one from the state perspective because I acknowledge that I think they learned something it.

But I think it was just the process of stepping back for a second and sort of accepting where you're at and meeting some outside people who at least look like they know what they're talking about, and some people who it was valuable for them.

And you'd have to ask them more directly the question, but I think they would tell you that the time. Although there was some significant time, it was worth it because it was really a successful endeavor for them.

MR. EAKELEY: Well, I also took Judge Newton's point that this serves as a blueprint also, or a checklist of attributes that state planning needs to address. And I thought that was very encouraging also.

MR. DUDOVITZ: Mm-hmm.

MS. BATTLE: I would just like to quickly say, Judge Newton, how encouraged I am. In Alabama, we are just beginning our process. And we just recently were able to get one of the present members of the Supreme Court in Alabama, as well as a former member of that court engaged in the process, and he has been coming to meetings, how important having judiciary provide leadership, as well as the bar, as well as people involved legal services, to have it happen.

So your enthusiasm I wish I could take to Alabama.

MR. EAKELEY: Well, you can.

MR. GROSS: You can take the enthusiasm; you can't have her.

JUDGE NEWTON: Yes, you know, we live in a very specific world, and we are very wedded to doing things in the way that way we have always done it.

And it's a wonderful opportunity for the judiciary to have its eyes opened and take a look at how our decisions, not only in the resolution of individual cases and controversies, but other decisions impact greatly on the lives of others, and on the operation of legal services communities.

I have a team of judges in every one of our districts who have a liaison committee now with the legal services and other providers in their district, so that they can just get to know one another --

A PARTICIPANT: Yeah.

JUDGE NEWTON: -- and to talk about the issues that locally impact them. And that's not brilliance, that's just opening the door to the ideas of others for the benefit of all.

MS. BATTLE: Thank you.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Bucky.

MR. ASKEW: The instrument that you shared with us quite awhile back, I was impressed with its thoroughness and thoughtfulness, and I was awed by its length --

JUDGE NEWTON: Yeah.

MR. ASKEW: -- and its detail. And I'm anxious for you to share, when you think it's appropriate, the next version with us, and so we can see how it has evolved into what it is today. Because the only concern I have heard expressed is from programs saying we're not threatened by this, but we're worried about the burden of it.

And I think what Bob said is going to be very useful in convincing some programs that this can be done in a way that's not overly burdened, but we have been to Washington.

We know the state of their programs there, and how they feel with some legitimacy they are leading the country by some of these issues. But I think it would be very helpful to us to see where it has evolved, so that we can get a sense of that for ourselves.

And, Judge Newton, if you were in law school 31 years ago, were you the only 13-year-old law student in America?

JUDGE NEWTON: This is why I love to come to Washington.

MR. EAKELEY: But he's from Atlanta.

JUDGE NEWTON: Well, I love Atlanta, too.

A PARTICIPANT: Southern gentleman.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Thank you very much. If there are no other questions at this time, we'll take --

MR. CLYDE: I just have one comment, and it's a follow-up on what Doug was saying, and Bucky as well, that it is -- and what Neal responded to Doug about -- there is apprehension on the part of our grantees and others who are involved with our grantees in the delivery system on the evaluation process.

But I have found that it's -- well, not universal -- the evaluation visits that we have done in both rounds have been very positively received. There is something about someone who approaches this in a professional, thoughtful, sensitive manner, that is giving feedback to the people they're talking to that have not heard from anybody about what they're doing, what their grantee staff are doing, in the case of board members or some of the judges, and others in the community, so that when somebody comes in indicating that they are interested in hearing their perspective, it really is a valuable process.

So I think that what may have happened in Washington will repeat itself, maybe not entirely across the country, but it will repeat itself and be a value, not only to the grantees, but in the state planning processes, but to the movement of the delivery of legal services movement.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Well, thank you very much. And the gentleman, Neal, on the telephone, also.

MR. DUDOVITZ: Well, thank you for that.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: And we'll take a five minute -- a 10 minute break here.

(A brief recess was taken.)

CHAIR WATLINGTON: LSC Diversity Training Module, then the next step.

MS. HANRAHAN: Shall I start?

CHAIR WATLINGTON: I'll turn it over to you, yes.

MS. HANRAHAN: Okay. Good morning, Madam Chair, committee members, and board members.

Thank you very much for allowing us to come this morning and share with you some of our personal experiences that have emerged from LSC's recent topics for projects in diversity and leadership. We're really delighted to be here this morning with you.

As many of you most likely read in our strategic directions update, as you'll see on the silver screen out in the hall near where we're having lunch, the past couple of years have been extraordinarily productive in the area of leadership and diversity at LSC.

And we hope to maintain this pace in 2003. And we're starting that pace with a meeting with leaders in the field on those topics in mid-February; and then in March, we're holding a training of trainers with the goal of producing a cadre of facilitators who can work with our grantees in the areas of diversity and leadership using our training module, which I believe you all received at the end of the year, 2002.

And if you didn't, please let me know. I'll be glad to get a copy for you. Today, bear with me, on the panel I have three distinguished speakers, two have come from afar, and another staff person.

And I want to start by introducing them, and then we'll begin with Gurdon Buck, and go to Wilhelm; and then if there is time at the end, Althea will bring you up-to-date on state planning and diversity and leadership activities.

And, at the end, also if you have questions on what we have done in the past that I can answer, or that we plan for 2003, I'd be glad to do so.

On my right, is Gurdon Buck. He is the chair of Statewide Legal Services of Connecticut, our grantee at the entry point in Connecticut for Legal Services Network.

Statewide Legal Services or SLS offers written and telephonic information on legal rights, helps clients solve legal problems on their own, refers them to other attorneys, and offers attorney consultant services telephonically.

Don is a partner at Robinson & Cole in Hartford, where he practices real estate law and chairs the firm's pro bono committee. In 2002, his work was recognized by the Connecticut Law Tribune when he received the coveted pro bono award for the state for separate and equal justice.

Don is here today in his capacity as chair of the SLS board, and an extremely brave chair, I'd like to say. Last September, he generously allowed the program to be a test site for our leadership and diversity training module, then it it's final draft stages.

Norman James and Don devised an impressive training program using our manual, and they were the very first ones in the whole country. We were really grateful. Don is here to tell you a bit how that went, and how it changed their approach to strategic planning and daily work.

We're grateful to him and the program for pioneering our module. It was significantly improved because of their engagements, and we deeply appreciate their willingness to put themselves on the line to do that. We believe it made the product ultimately worthy of our clients and our grantees.

On my far left, as usual, is Wilhelm Joseph, who has participation in other boards and has involvement in many legal services initiatives. He is the executive director of the Maryland Legal Aid Bureau, which, like Connecticut, is a statewide program. He has a long history in legal services, beginning in Mississippi in 1974, from there to New York City, and in 1996, he took over leadership at LAB in Maryland as a successor to Charlie Dorsey. Through it all, Wilhelm has also been a moving force in the national African-American Project Directors Association.

Wilhelm was a central part of the advisory team that worked with us in NLADA 2001, to organize our national conversation on gender and diversity. He was then invited, along with a small group of leaders, to help us build our training module that Don will talk to you about, and he will continue to play an advisor role to us in 2003.

Wilhelm's involvement, and that of his colleagues on the committee, have ensured that our efforts are organized to reap the greatest benefits for grantees and claims. And he is here today to report on our work in the past, and his hopes for the future.

Althea, who is on my immediate left, is our staff person at LSC. You may remember her from previous board meetings. She is our diversity specialist in the State Planning Unit. And if there is time at the end, she'll just talk very briefly about her work in that unit.

Thanks very much, and I'd like to start with Don.

MR. BUCK: Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Pat. Good morning, committee members, and board members. I didn't realize that I was put on the right because I'm a Republican. But when Wilhelm very busily rearranged all of the chairs, I didn't figure that that was done on purpose.

My name is Gurdon Buck. I'm called Don because that's the last three letters, and all my mother could make of it. I practice as a condominium and common interest community lawyer with Robinson & Cole in Hartford.

I am a transactional lawyer. And I sort of worked my way into the pro bono groups trying to obtain opportunities for transactional lawyers rather than the litigators. Litigators are usually on a win/lose basis, and transactional lawyers are "let's make a deal."

I mentioned to Pat that when I was first appointed to the pro bono committee, because I yelled at the president of the bar for not having any transactional lawyers, I was listed in the agendas in membership as representing the transitional lawyers, and I insisted that I was a real lawyer.

But, as I say, no good deed go unpunished. I have become the president of Statewide Legal Services, and was one of its organizers when we decided to have a statewide hot line approach to the generation of pro bono services.

I also found that the speeches earlier on were very interesting because I am an urban planner and member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. And they say that urban planners are people who colored inside the lines when they were 5 years old. So I was very interested in the mapping program.

I started as an engineer at Lehigh and had trouble with calculus, thus not having the charisma to become an economic demographic statistician, I became a lawyer. However, I still feel that planning is important and have been engaged as an advocation on the side, and being a common interest ownership lawyer/real estate lawyer I find it a substantially large part of my practice.

Statewide Legal Services is the grantee in Connecticut, and we provide the entrance to the Legal Services Corporation for the independently funded other legal aid services in Connecticut including special legal aid focus groups from the civil liberties organizations, children, Hispanics, gays.

We have charitable corporations, community organizers, all of which we refer the call-ins to. And, in addition, we provide sort of Readers Digest level of legal counsel documentation and pro se assistance to many of the people called.

Last fall, Althea Hayward, and Evora Thomas, who was your consultant, came to talk to us and provide the planning workshop for diversity. And this, what I am going to give you, is the summary of what has happened since the workshop.

I would certainly echo the statement that the LSC, the national LSC, is a distant voice to us, mostly as a bureaucratic irritant. And we were very pleased when Althea and Evora came and actually talked to us, and we had an absolutely wonderful evening.

As I have explained to Pat, and to Althea, the lectures and materials were, in fact, preaching to the choir. It's not meant to be pejorative, but by virtue of the -- of our audience, the audience consisting of officers and staff of Statewide Legal Services, we're committed to diversity, and we always have been.

We have always recognized our principal clients come from a wide variety of diverse group of needy citizens because of their poor minority, or poor female status would be most subject to legal needs that they can't afford.

But the material is built on our existing emotional political commitment to that goal. It broadened our perspective. And we realize that the day-to-day service of mostly poor, or African-American, or Hispanic, or female clients must be expanded to cover many other types of underserved groups and needy people.

And also, our personnel, who have been focused on the regular clients that come in on a day-to-day basis, as a result of our relatively focused outreach to social service agencies must be more diversified in type, character, and outlook.

At the time of the lecture, we are in the process of revising and updating our long-range business plan. We were rushing in where angels fear to tread, as we didn't have the benefit of the forthcoming valuative planning instrument.

So we started with the old planning rules of -- which is -- I will call it FLA, which is a four letter acronym, SWOP, S-W-O-P, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and plan.

And we went through those four elements and began generating a business plan, but the lecture provided a substantial change to our focus. It filled in certain weaknesses in opportunities we weren't aware of in the areas of diversity.

We thought that diversity was something that was so basic to us that we could just not pay it any direct attention; we learned differently. The draft business plan, as it's presently in its place, has a diversity section which would have been left out.

It presently says, "With the encouragement from LSC, the board has committed itself to developing a diversity plan." And we have concluded it makes sense to include that topic a part of the strategic planning process. A diversity plan ought to be modeled on a three-legged stool. One leg is a meaningful, aggressive, affirmative action hiring plan. This will be particularly important to develop right away as we contemplate some hiring.

The second leg is the proposal described above, which we had to plan, to create targeted outreach projects. And I'll talk about that later. This will put us in touch with groups and communities that are not part of our traditional constituency.

This is a very tangible way to adapt LSC's theory that the programmatic value of diversity is openness to a wide range of client communities. Building relationships with new and different client groups will not only bring us in contact with heretofore underserved clients, but teach us to hear and serve that diversity.

The final leg is a staff and board that is truly diverse creating an organization that is welcoming of and sensitive to differences within the organization, so that it can be welcome and be sensitive to a diverse constituency and serve them in creative ways.

More thought and planning need to go into developing this final critical aspect of the diversity plan. And under the guidance of this provision, we're going to be taking these following direct actions.

Fortunately, if you look at the map I did very carefully, you discover that Connecticut is one of those states that did have an increase in its poverty population; thus, we got an increase in our funding.

We, thus, have the ability to go out and hire. Our staff is extremely loyal. There is very little turnover in the last 10 years, but now is a question where we can fill in. We looking at both part-time and full-time additions to the staff.

We hope to recruit those people who are personally committed to serving the poor from a wide range of ethnic, racial, and sexual orientation backgrounds. A personal commitment is one we must look for. We can't pay as much money as racially diverse law students are offered elsewhere.

In our recruitment for new staff, we have intentionally sent notices to all of the minority bar associations in Connecticut, as an additional way of targeting minority outlook. And in our descriptions that we send to the law schools, we have added a diversity component as a selling point to people who would be interested in serving the poor.

We have a regular program of lectures to social workers, assistance workers, charitable corporations who serve the needy to have a poverty law lecture, where we emphasize our desire to provide legal services to the economically underserved.

But now we have added to the lecture to reach out to other ethnic groups who are estranged from the Connecticut legal system, not just by poverty, but by language and cultural barriers.

As we undertake our normal outreach activities, we're going to attempt to extend them to contact the "grasstops." You all know what "grassroots" are, which are the citizens. The grasstops are the leadership of the ethnically diverse culture centers, in order to offer our services.

Connecticut's developing, as many other states, a number of ethnically isolated centers of new immigrants from the Middle East, the Balkan countries, the Indian subcontinent, the former Warsaw Pact nations, as well as the strong and growing Caribbean-based settlements that have been here for several generations, but are continuing to grow; when our second generation of Vietnamese settlements, where the immigrants are already disbursing, but there are new ones coming.

We have seen our principal clientele in the past is African-American, single parent female, and Hispanic. We are pretty well-organized to treat those three groups, and the few that come in between. We have a number of Spanish-speaking advocates on our staff and on duty at all times.

However, the new initiative is going to be reaching out to these other cultural groups for equally needy and underserved -- and even, in many cases, don't even know that there is such a thing as American justice systems.

We feel that with an outreach targeted to a non-traditional client group is it's going to provide an opportunity for the staff to experience and come to understand other cultures and expand their own diversity experience; and then we're going to carefully review our office policies and culture to make sure that everybody is more welcoming, more sensitive to diversity and cultural differences, and more fun.

This is under planning, and we're trying to work on that. We already have a lot of fun going on, but we were trying to see if the fun can have some good culturally diverse basis as well.

In conclusion, as one of our speakers said, thankfully, I have always considered the profession of law to be the principal bow work between order and domestic tranquility on one side, and anarchy and chaos on the other.

Profession maintains an excellent barrier to well-financed and well-staffed defense in the areas where society can afford to mount a sophisticated and strong effort. However, the bow work must be provided throughout our entire society, or the forces of darkness and street law will burst through and create a loss of order.

The legal service staff, which was bolstered by the praiseworthy, but woefully inadequate pro bono efforts of the bar, and some of the other private organizations is one of the thinner and weaker portions of the bow work. It's a thin line. It's essential.

Services must be provided to all who would be otherwise forced to exercise self-help and street justice, which would evolve into anarchy and rule of the strong or the weak.

And while the rest of our citizenry look to the great goal of equal justice for all, which we are founded, we have to stretch to provide protections of our legal system to a greater diversity of ethnic cultural and racial groups than those in our traditional clientele, even though our traditional clientele are already diverse and terribly, terribly needy.

In addition, in our diverse current clientele, we must become more sensitive to their own cultural character and racial differences and sensitivities. A continued sense of diversity and variety the underserved needy clients must be in the forefront of our minds.

Although Althea was preaching to the flyer, as you are a preacher, is it -- having been preached to, our liturgy to which we already were committed, we learned to sing better with more variety and more effect. Thank you.

MS. HANRAHAN: Thank you, Don, very much. And if there are no questions, I will turn the podium, as it were, over to Wilhelm.

MR. JOSEPH: Good morning.

MR. EAKELEY: Good morning.

MR. JOSEPH: I should first apologize to Don for rearranging the seat because the way it was set up, the Republican was supposed to be on the left. But that doesn't bother me, because I come from a state where some strange things are happening.

Our newly elected Republican lieutenant governor says he's against the death penalty, and we have a governor who says he is for gambling or slot machines. So we can't figure out, you know, who is what.

Talking about the lieutenant governor, he came to a meeting last week of all the legal service providers, and a very interesting meeting. And the chief judge was talking about how it was agreed first to have the first African-American lieutenant governor, and the first Republican lieutenant governor in 24 years.

I told him why it was great that it was the first to be an African-American elected ever in the state of Maryland. Think about it. The only reason why it was history is because of the injustice that, you know, existed here for a very long time.

So while we take pride in being the first, and so on, you know, sometimes it's good to focus on why this is the case. This morning I figured out a first for me. I am the first non-Republican in 25 years to run the Legal Aid Bureau in Maryland.

Figure that out, the first non-Republican in 25 years. Do you know why? Charles Dorsey ran it for 25 years.

I also was asking myself, you're the commentator, maybe my stock is rising. But the stock market has been going down for three years. I'm now appearing the second time before the board; something good is happening. I appreciate that.

This morning when I heard Judge Bing Newton from New York, it brought back something to me that I guess all of us can remember, probably. And this talk is about leadership and diversity. And that woman exercised some leadership that is unparalleled in my experience.

It was September 11th, 2001, and 300 of us were gathered in New York State to participate in an Access to Justice Conference. And, as I was getting ready to give the first scheduled speech at 9 o'clock in the morning, you know what happened.

And it was complete confusion, chaos, don't know what to do, biting fingernails, worrying, wondering. And she got up there and by some miracle put us in a state of mind that we could proceed and deal with the business for the next day-and-a-half.

It was extraordinary leadership. And I told Juanita this morning that that morning my first sentence that I had prepared to utter, I had to strike it. I told her this morning, I would share with her and the audience what those first words were.

I had written the night before that in this country there is a crisis of justice, and to me that was a prescription for a tremendous explosion. And you know why I couldn't say that on the morning of September 11th. And I don't know if there is connection to it, but I felt that way.

This question of leadership and diversity, someone described it -- as a Harvard professor said, "These issues of diversity, and so on, doesn't involve rocket science. It's much more difficult."

In that regard, I want to acknowledge the commitment of these current board members. And, bear with me, I'm going to talk a lot about acknowledgements and credit, and a little bit of diversity.

Because this board, all of you, have worked for several long months and years dealing with this question of "Access to Justice." I think the more you're here, we appreciate what you have done. We really appreciate what you have done.

I have not met all of the new board members. I know one of them, Mike McKay. And I wish them the best and applaud their commitment to leave their important jobs all over the country to come here to address the needs of poor people and access to justice.

We pledge our support. I haven't been given the mandate to speak for the entire field, but I feel I can do that and say we will give our support to any board that is committed to working for justice for people.

There are some people in this room who I think -- and some are not here -- who deserve special mention, particularly this question of diversity and leadership. Four of them I mention only because they have personally effected my life over the years: Bucky, Maria, Ms. Battle, because they have stuck very close the issue of diversity and leadership. I want to thank them, their leadership.

John McKay and Doug Eakeley, the board chairman, you accommodated this issue and allowed it to go forward. And, John McKay, I know this issue is controversial among people in legal services, but he made some very concrete and strong commitments to this issue. I can say he followed through, and I appreciate that.

Clint Lyons, who worked with John quite a bit, to get this thing moving. Martha Bergmark, Willie Cook, there is no way you sit around and discuss the issue without thinking, "Well, what will Willie think? What will Willie do?" And, in that way, influences what we do.

And Ramon Arias, and Jose Padilla, and Lucy Wisaki, and many others, are very special people. Your staff work great, this current staff, Randi Youells, who have come to the leadership of the corporation at a difficult time, and dealing with difficult issues have put together a very diverse, and very effective staff, and I want to acknowledge that. Two of them are sitting right next to me here, on my right.

The clients on the Board of Legal Services Corporation, the clients and our boards, the clients we serve, think for a moment what it means to be a client. It means you are associated with that group of people in this country who have least power, least money, least influence, and you are asked to participate meaningfully with those who are just on the other side.

It takes courage; it takes patience; and it takes tremendous skills. And if you want to understand who are the best listeners of those clients in all of these meetings, I want to thank them, and commend them. You're quite a committee. There are two males, and seven males.

Boy, we were quite surrounded, some brilliant women. We had to stay in our place and do our work, and they came up with a very good product. And you heard Don talking about how effective that product was for them in Connecticut.

So I spent a lot of time mentioning different individuals. And that was deliberate. I think as you focus on each person, each group, you should have gotten a sense of how diverse that group was, and how diverse the experiences they come from.

And I hope you agree with me that this diversity of opinions, and experiences, and approaches is what has helped us over the years to navigate troubled waters, survive lean times, overcome the intermittent barriers, achieve or establish goals and objectives, all in a way that continues to provide care, comfort, justice, and hope for the poor, for the less wealthy among us.

So let me go to this thing called diversity, I think involve about three -- at least three things for me. One I talk about, it's about leadership; people who are willing to take on an important and critical but sometimes controversial issue and see it go through its course to its end.

I'm talking about leadership and I mentioned those three leaders. But for us, who are directors of programs, it's more of something operational. Let me demonstrate that by telling you of my simple approach to how we approach our work every day, and how that plays a role.

I see my job as four pieces: We must deliver the most excellent services to clients, that's number one; by supporting the well-being of the family; by preserving homes; preventing the loss of affordable housing; maintaining and enhancing economic stability; promoting health and safety and welfare of the vulnerable, children, elderly, sick, disabled. So number one is that service.

Two, we have to accumulate resources. In the nonprofit world, it's a great challenge. In the private sector, you sell a good product, you do good marketing, satisfied customer buys.

Here we have satisfied customers, great products, the consumer does not pay, cannot pay. We have to go persuade third parties, sometimes parties whose interest and position we have just defeated and say, "Help us fund the folks we just represented against you." That's a hell of a challenge.

Three, we must expend those resources wisely. I see two things: (1) we spend that money on the right things; and (2) we get the best deal.

The fourth thing we do, we just have to manage all of that. In Maryland, we have 300 employees, 13 offices. So I must manage the production of the service, the accumulation of their resources, and do all of that, and still in a way that comes out with the best result for clients.

So to accomplish that, I want the best ideas. I want the best talent. I want the most appropriate and creative minds at work. I want the most insightful people. I want the highest degree of motivation from everybody.

I believe I can't find that unless I tap a very diverse universe of people, whether it's the funding sources I'm going to, whether it's the employees I'm trying to recruit; and then to understand the needs, the aspirations, the experiences of the plans we serve.

Together that approach, that tapping into that diversity, produces what I believe is excellence in performance. When I think of diversity, the word that comes to my mind, always at the forefront, is excellence in performance.

So leadership, yes, where it's really about excellence. How does it contribute to excellence in performance? And, not surprisingly, success breeds success. You're good at what you do, the folks are attracted to you, recruitment becomes easy.

In Legal Services Corporation, I wouldn't call the person's name, they're right here in the room, called me two weeks ago, three weeks ago, "Wilhelm, I've got a great lawyer for you, a candidate. He's an honor grad of Harvard Law School, worked for three years in a big law firm, but commitment to serving people is calling."

I said, "I will accommodate that person in a hurry. Let me talk with him." That recommendation was made because the success speaks for itself. And, by the way, the person after I interviewed him turned out to be an African-American. I was more excited.

With diversity, my third point is about representativeness and fearless. I was reading the manual this morning. It points out, for example, that this board is constituted to ensure diversity between clients and lawyers -- interesting.

In fact, I said, "You know, that's a quota. It's a quota," q-u-o-t-a. We all are against quotas, but it says, "No more than six from the party of the president in power." Is that a quota or not? Right? No, 60 percent lawyers, is that a quota or not?

Well, we do it because we understand it's important to assure what? Representativeness. We probably, by only including six Republicans, have denied some very other qualified Republicans to look and seat five Democrats.

That's awful, isn't it? They should sue because they're qualified, and five Democrats will take their spot. You understand why I'm making that point, so I'll move on.

Let me share with you -- I did not know this, but I was talking about diversity last year, November, in Virginia. And I said, "I'd better call my program and find out what our makeup is." I didn't know.

I found out in Maryland they are 3.5 percent Asian, and my staff was 2 percent Asian. I said oops. I found out Maryland was 28 percent black. My staff was 40 percent black. The state was 4.3 percent Hispanic. We were 3 percent Hispanic. The state was 64 percent white, and we were 50 percent white.

Let's dig deeper and deeper. Let's check with the attorneys: Asians, 2 percent; black, 28 percent; Hispanic, 4 percent; white, 65 percent, Native American, 1 percent.

I said check a little deeper. Gender: female, 72 percent; male, 28 percent. Someone said 40- plus in age, 46 percent; 60-plus, 8 percent. I said look at the management. Come on, let's look at management: female, 58 percent; male, 40 percent; Asian, 3 percent; black, 20 percent; Hispanic, 3 percent; white 31 percent.

I said, "Now I feel competent to go and speak on this issue. It's pretty good." I didn't know it, but I wanted to share it with you.

Now why a training module? Why a training module? Why spend time, money, effort? I think we know the answer. I have not met a single person yet who said, "I do not believe in diversity. But there are some issues.

And we had a wonderful, wonderful consultant, who is now a staff member at the corporation, who worked us through these issues. When you talk about diversity, feelings come to the surface.

If you're a white male you think, "Oh, oh, they're about to attack me." If you're a black female you think, "Oh, they're going to forget me," and so on, and so forth.

There is uneasiness and discomfort with the issue. There is miscommunication, misunderstanding. There is sometimes a lack of knowledge of the history and the understanding. You know I went to the States when I left Trinidad to go to college and to law school.

When I was in Ole Miss Law School in the 1960s, there was not one single black athlete in any sport in the entire university. I am amazed to look at the Southeast Conference and see the entire basketball team black, or the entire football team and quarterback black.

These issues are important because that we do not understand the history we come from. There is always disagreement on the approach, "How do we do it?" I am for equal opportunity, but I'm not for quotas.

We are unfamiliar with facts and figures. And, mostly, we lack the know how, how to do it right. There are books and courses, we are now learning how to do it right.

Let me end by saying that you heard the experience of Don, how this module helped them in Connecticut. It has been tested in Arizona very successfully, I must tell you also. And we're happy with the result.

I urge this board and the new board to commit yourself to moving forward on this question of diversity and inclusion and representativeness in the interest of excellence in what we do.

I believe that the expense we include, the time we spent, and the hassles we went through are all worth it. And I hope when you look at this module, and you deliver it, the new board deliver it, you'll agree with us.

I apologize for taking a lot more time than I intended to. I'm done.

MS. HANRAHAN: Thank you very much, Wilhelm.

MR. EAKELEY: For the moment.

MS. HANRAHAN: Are there any questions for Wilhelm or Don?

(No response.)

MS. HANRAHAN: Well, then we'll move to Althea Hayward, as I said, a staff person at LSC, who is our diversity specialist in the area of state planning.

MS. HAYWARD: Good morning, Madam Chair, and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to just share a couple of items with you about what we're doing with state planning and diversity.

Besides our support of LSC's National Diversity Initiative, we have also begun the process of summarizing the diversity work that is being done in each state's justice community. And this will form the basis for our work over the next year with state justice communities as a part of the state planning team.

Secondly, we have had quite a bit of interaction with our state justice communities and members from various state justice groups from planners.

Particularly, I participated in Virginia with Wilhelm on a panel that took on the issue of state planning and diversity and leadership, and how the three prongs work together to provide fresh air for delivery of legal services.

I also had the opportunity to consult with leaders in Connecticut and Kentucky. Currently, we are working on putting together a proposal for consideration to work with national partners in identifying corporate diversity mentors for each state's planning community.

This is very much in its early stages, but we look forward to having that program, as well, be successful. Thank you.

MS. HANRAHAN: LaVeeda.

MS. BATTLE: I was just intrigued, as Wilhelm spoke, that part of what he did was to go back and look in his own house to see if it was in order and exemplary of what he was advocating.

And I wonder for our own house at Legal Services do we have a breakdown of our staff, so that we can see where we are as we provide leadership on this issue?

MS. HANRAHAN: That's a good question, LaVeeda. I personally don't know the answer. But I would expect that Alice Dickerson, or John Eidleman, Mr. Erlenborn would be able to get that information if we don't have it here today for you.

MS. MERCADO: Now I liked the way strata worked, in the sense of the evaluation that Mr. Joseph did, in looking at his staff and saying, "Okay. You have, you know, 60 percent female," and then looking at what categories of leadership opportunities they had within his program whether they were in management, or they were support staff.

Because a lot of the time you might have some diversity, but not necessarily where they're doing decision-making or creating some challenges for delivering legal services to the client community. So that would be interesting for us to see.

MR. McCALPIN: LaVeeda, my recollection is that we have had at times in the past a breakdown of our staff by ethnic composition, gender composition, and the level of positions that they held. I don't think we have seen it in the last year or two, but I do recall having seen it since we have been here.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: I agree with Dale. I remember one time it was done.

MS. BATTLE: Yeah, I think, particularly, because we are engaged right now in this issue of diversity and providing leadership to the nation on it, that we need to take a fresh look at that.

And I certainly would like to see the numbers and see them, as Maria has pointed out, in the various levels of leadership within our own organization, so we can see exactly where we stand.

MR. ERLENBORN: Madam Chair, let me, with promise for the executive branch of the corporation, that we will provide that information for you, update it if we have some information already, as Bill suggested. But with Alice's support and help, I'll see that that's done.

MS. BATTLE: Good.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: As Chair, I remember in Pennsylvania we had -- I am still concerned too that there are not enough directors of the field programs too. Especially, I appreciated like the -- what is it -- that like the director of association?

MS. HANRAHAN: African-American Directors Association.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: African-American. But that has been a problem in the program for many, many years, that there were not enough African-American in leadership.

MR. ASKEW: Ernestine. Pat, we are not being asked to do anything today as a --

MS. HANRAHAN: No, this is just an update for you.

MR. ASKEW: Okay.

MS. HANRAHAN: To let you know how --

MR. ASKEW: Can I make a personal comment? Joe, Wilhelm, and I got to know each other when we were both much younger men. His hair was dark, and I was not on nearly as much medication as I am now.

But I was the regional director in Atlanta when he was the director at North Mississippi Rural Legal Services back in the '70s. And I think he would agree both of us have grown dramatically in that time.

MR. McCALPIN: Expanded.

MR. ASKEW: Expanded. The downside from knowing him that long is that my wife has had an openly acknowledged crush on Wilhelm for 25 years, which he is aware of. I got to introduce my son to him last night and say, "This is the man your mother has had a crush on for 25 years."

I think one of the reasons she has is because of what you saw here today, his passion, and how articulate he is, and how strongly he feels about these things. And I just like -- and we met your director of litigation at one of our earlier meetings. And so, we have seen the quality of work that's going on in your program.

But I just want to say for the record that what a terrific job you did in New York, and what you're doing now in Baltimore, and how far you have come from Mississippi. And, hopefully, I have come as far in my life as you have in yours.

MR. JOSEPH: Thank you, Bucky.

MR. SMEGAL: I just wanted to make a comment. I don't know Wilhelm, but I wish I knew you better. I was very touched by your comments this morning. And one of the things you said that struck a chord in me, and put a lot in perspective. Where sometimes diversity becomes numbers and counting heads, and we lose the real purpose of it. And you said something which resonated with me, which is it's about excellence. And I think all of us from time-to-time forget that.

And you have to search a broad cross-section of people to find the good people, the best people. And I think diversity should be as normal as breathing in and breathing out. And I don't think any of us has found a job that we should do in that area.

And your remarks today, as I'm leaving the board after 112 years in service, brought that home to me -- maybe 113 years or so -- brought that home to me. And I appreciate the passion of your remarks this morning on that topic.

I have heard it discussed many times, but I have never heard it discussed quite that directly and sensibly. And I thank you for that.

MR. JOSEPH: Thank you.

MS. MERCADO: No, I know that in part of the, sort of a continuous strategic look at, not only the legal services delivery, or the delivery of legal services, but also, in particular, with this aspect that deals with diversity in our competitive and bidding process, one of the aspects that grantees must show legal services in whether or not they get a grant is what their diversity plans, and what their actual programs in the delivery of different diverse client communities is.

And I thought that the presentation that we had in Los Angeles was excellent. I forgot how many languages we had of staff represented from all over the world of the clients of legal services that they represent, and materials and documents that they provide.

But that also that they have people within the legal services delivery that were also of those different cultures that understood so that they could effectively deliver legal services to those clients communities; and that that was excellent, you know, to see that constantly.

And I am hopeful that with our partners, with the ABA, NLADA, our pro bono and justice communities, in the different states, and we will continue to work on those issues in doing that effective equality of legal services with the diverse community that we have.

So I know that one of the specific action items that actually the diversity task force did work on -- and I'm not sure at what stage it is -- was the issue of working with the Congress in the loan forgiveness programs, so that we could encourage more law students, law graduates from diverse backgrounds that want to go back and work in the communities that they come from, that they understand, but are not able to do so because of the huge debt that they have once they get out of law school.

And I'm not sure. I know that through our partners in the ABA, NLADA, and the other friends that we're going to be looking at working at a loan forgiveness program.

And there sort of was an action tangible item that we could look at to provide and increase the resources by providing more lawyers from those diverse backgrounds. And I'm not sure where we are in that process.

MS. HANRAHAN: That's not a project under my domain. But Mr. Erlenborn, and I think Cindy Schneider, have attended meetings. And I don't mean to speak for them, but I think they're the point people on this. Am I correct?

MR. ERLENBORN: Okay.

MS. MERCADO: Well, we wish you success on that.

MR. ERLENBORN: Thank you.

A PARTICIPANT: Me, too.

MS. HANRAHAN: Gurdon.

MR. BUCK: Madam Chairman, I would like to echo exactly what you have said. We are struggling at the moment in recruiting, and we can't pay what the large law firms are paying ethnically and racially diverse law students.

They are in great, great need, because I think all of society is recognizing the real economic value of diversity. And we are out there trying to get the goodwill and the -- just sort of general commitment to make up for lack of money.

I'd like to emphasize also, agreeing with you, that diversity is squishy. As I say, I no longer -- gave up being an economic demographic statistician, and who I think have a problem of evaluating success by what they can measure.

Diversity is very soft. And I think that as we go in the evaluation, there has to be a subjective part of the evaluation which can pick up attitude, not just the racially diverse, or the numbers of who are members of what group.

And I feel, and I am working very hard in my group, to make diversity fun. It is fun. It's enlightening. It's educational. It's entertaining. It creates good feeling. There is a smoothing of administration. It's enriching. It's very, very friendly.

And I think that it's the kind of thing that we can look at positively. Because when people start talking about diversity, everybody gets a long face and feels gloomy. But I think that small successes in this area are some things that can be a lot of fund.

Well, thank you for your attention.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Thank you very much.

MR. JOSEPH: Let me just tell you something. I was quite surprised by the statistics because I had not looked at them. So I had not sat down and said, "We should have this be equal to that or the other."

What I have done is, in looking at a particular office, particular needs, is try to find the best match, the best argument or approach is. This is the way it came out in the end. And I was quite surprised, in fact, totally surprised.

Because I know how hard it is also to do recruiting, particularly, in the attorney class for all the reasons you mentioned. But I find that success brings us success. It's an interesting thing.

As you get more associated with excellence, it will come to you. And you get a diverse pool to draw upon. You still have the challenges of the money. But the most successful you are, the more you can sell yourself to those third party peers and say, "Give us more money."

What is a state? What is the IOLTA program? What is individual lawyers? What is foundations? So it's a dynamic process.

MS. HANRAHAN: In closing, I just wanted to say from the staff, thank you very much for your support for all our diversity work, and for allowing us to have fun.

MR. JOSEPH: Thank you.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Thank you. Next on the agenda here is "Consider and act on other business." I think it was Monica who wanted to say something.

MS. HOLMAN: Yes. Thank you. Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the committee. My name is Monica Holman, with the Office of Program Performance. And I just want to thank you for this opportunity to give you an update on the LSC resource initiative.

As you know, that's our web-based library that showcases innovative practices and noteworthy programs that are helpful to the legal services community. And we did officially launch that website on October 3rd, and we have been extremely busy since that time.

In November, we actually did a demonstration at the NLADA Conference, and we have been adding sections and categories to the website ever since. Right now, just some examples of the material you can find on the website include information on intake, pro se, technology, state planning.

And I am happy to announce that just yesterday we launched our expanded section on diversity. Usage continues to grow on the site. Since October, we have had about 100,000 hits on the site. And just within the past 30 days, we have seen usage increase by about 30 percent.

So it's a great initiative. One of our marketing tools is a t-shirt which prominently displays the web address on the back of the shirt. And I do have t-shirts for all of the members of the board. So you can go back and proudly display that we do have the resource library and it is up, and it does have the web address on there.

I am located in the lobby and I'm doing demonstrations; or if you have not had the opportunity to view the site, you have the opportunity to just kind of look through and see the kinds of information we have on there. And I would be happy to answer any questions.

But I am just really excited. This was just a thought a year-and-a-half ago, and now to see the site up and to see people use the site. And we have received wonderful comments and feedback. And I think it's just going to get better and better. So thank you.

MR. EAKELEY: We're excited, too. This is really just a wonderful development that permits us to identify and publicize best practices that -- with virtually no cost that help our grantees and their clients provide better service and access. And I want to commend you on this.

MS. HOLMAN: That's sweet. Thank you.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Is there anyone else?

(No response.)

CHAIR WATLINGTON: I can't believe we --

A PARTICIPANT: You do a better job than I used to do.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: We did it. There being no other --

M O T I O N

MR. EAKELEY: Move we adjourn.

A PARTICIPANT: Good.

CHAIR WATLINGTON: It's been moved. And all in favor say aye.

(Chorus of ayes.)

CHAIR WATLINGTON: Opposed, the same.

(No response.)

CHAIR WATLINGTON: It's been moved and seconded. The meeting is adjourned, and it's not quite 12 o'clock yet.

A PARTICIPANT: Very good.

(Whereupon, at 11:48 a.m., the meeting was concluded.)

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