8/23/2008

By Dimple Abichandani, Director of Program Development, Legal Services NYC, Joann H. Lee, Directing Attorney, Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, and Paul Uyehara, Senior Attorney, Community Legal Services

In December 2004, the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) issued a program letter requiring grantee organizations to develop plans for providing language access services for limited English proficient (LEP) clients. Since that time, many organizations have adopted policies and have instituted protocols for serving the language needs of limited English proficient clients. At a recent national convening of legal services advocates working on language access, a topic of great interest was the diversity of models and staffing approaches that organizations around the country have developed for coordinating internal and external efforts to serve LEP clients and language access advocacy. This article highlights innovative approaches from five legal services programs meeting the multilingual needs of clients.

Iowa Legal Aid: Increasing Language Capacity through the AmeriCorps Program
Iowa Legal Aid (ILA) is a statewide, LSC-funded program that provides general civil legal services through ten regional offices. ILA has approximately one hundred staff members, including sixty-seven attorneys. ILA serves LEP clients who speak Spanish, Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, Arabic, Somali, Vietnamese and other South East Asian languages.

The language access efforts at ILA are administered by a LEP Coordinator, who is a bilingual paralegal. The LEP coordinator maintains a list of interpreter and translator resources, oversees translations, makes recommendations for expanding language access based on monitoring hotline calls and oversees language access training. The LEP Coordinator also oversees an agencywide language access taskforce which develops an annual language access related work plan for the coordinator and addresses emerging language access issues, training and ongoing implementation of the policy. The LEP coordinator produces an annual report to the Executive Director detailing progress on the work plan and on expanding language access to limited English proficient clients.

ILA currently has eight bilingual staff members who serve as staff interpreters and use telephonic interpretation resources for languages not available on staff. ILA supplements the staff language resources by recruiting bilingual AmeriCorps members to provide interpretation, translation and outreach services. The AmeriCorps members have their language skills assessed when they start with ILA, and then are trained in interpretation and translation skills.

continued in PDF. Download it here MIE Summer 2008.