Legal Services NYC Chair Featured as Presenter at LSC Annual Meeting

The Legal Services Corporation’s (LSC) Board of Directors met at LSC headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 30-31 for the group’s Annual Meeting for 2009. Fern Schair, Chair of the Legal Services NYC Board of Directors, was one of five chairs of LSC-funded programs who gave a panel presentation to LSC’s Operations and Regulations Committee on their role in guiding a high-quality legal aid program. The event was featured in a February 5th edition of the LSC Update.

From left to right: Fern Schair; Diane Kutzko, Iowa Legal Aid; Michael Doucette, Virginia Legal Aid Society; Marjorie Anne McDiarmid, Legal Aid of West Virginia. Not pictured: Robert Goodin from Bay Area Legal Aid (Calif.)

From the LSC Update:

The meeting of the Operations and Regulations Committee featured a panel presentation by current and former Chairpersons of the Boards of Directors of LSC-funded programs on the role of grantee boards in governance and oversight of LSC-funded programs. Members of the panel were Michael Doucette from the Virginia Legal Aid Society, Diane Kutzko from Iowa Legal Aid, Marjorie Anne McDiarmid from Legal Aid of West Virginia, Fern Schair from Legal Services NYC, and Robert Goodin from Bay Area Legal Aid (Calif.), who participated via video conference. Topics of discussion included the pros and cons of term limits for board members, the common difficulty in recruiting and retaining client-eligible board members, and suggestions for how LSC could help grantee boards by, for example, producing training materials and sharing best practices. A transcript of the session will be made available on LSC’s website, www.lsc.gov, in mid-February.

The Congress of the United States entrusts the Legal Services Corporation with a dual mission: to promote equal access to justice and to provide high-quality civil legal assistance to low-income Americans.

Congress created LSC in 1974. Each year, as part of the budget process, Congress appropriates money for LSC. A bipartisan, 11-member Board of Directors — appointed by the President of the United States with the advice and consent of the Senate — oversees all aspects of LSC operations.

The main source of funding for civil legal aid, LSC gives grants to independent, local programs — in 2009, 137 programs with more than 920 offices nationwide. Grants are awarded through a competitive process. Generally, the size of the grant is based on the number of people living in poverty in a given state or service area.