Alaska
Bridging the Rural Justice Gap: Innovating & Scaling Up Civil Access to Justice in Alaska
Organization: University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Primary Investigator: Michele Statz
Research Track: Resource and Service Equity
In Alaska, under-resourced rural infrastructure and a lack of trained legal professionals leave low-income individuals with civil legal needs, among them problems related to debt, domestic violence, and housing, with little chance of achieving a just resolution. In response, this project brings together the University of Minnesota Medical School, Alaska Legal Services Corporation, the American Bar Foundation Access to Justice Research Initiative, and the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium to explore how to scale up and sustain the nascent Community Justice Worker (CJW) project. The CJW project is the first of its kind, representing a replicable delivery model that trains trusted, culturally-representative community health workers and others already embedded in rural and remote regions to provide critical legal advocacy, including formal legal advice and representation.
NSF Abstract
In the U.S., underfunded rural infrastructure and corresponding inequities in employment, health care, and education put individuals at high risk for civil legal problems. Yet many rural regions have few if any attorneys. The resulting gap between common civil issues like debt collection, domestic violence, and eviction on the one hand, and access to legal assistance on the other, is profoundly consequential to community resilience and health. These consequences are amplified in Alaska, where only 1.13 attorneys are available for every 10,000 Alaskans in poverty. In response, Alaska Legal Services Corporation recently developed the community justice worker (CJW) program, which trains individuals embedded in Alaska?s rural communities to provide formal legal advocacy and practice insights. By scaling up the CJW program, this project is directly addressing the civil legal needs of rural and Indigenous communities in Alaska. It is also contributing to local health and welfare, regional economic empowerment, and transformative legal aid delivery practices across the U.S.
Leveraging scientific and policy insights, regional expertise, and local relationships, the project team is: 1) Developing formal training, supervising, and credentialing processes for CJWs; 2) Growing best practices for recruiting and retaining CJWs and for workforce development; 3) Testing short- and long-term sustainability models for CJW infrastructure; and 4) Creating a framework for evaluation and evidence-based practices. Through rigorous, mixed-methodological data collection (qualitative interviews, survey and training data), continuous review and engagement with local stakeholders and Community Advisory Board members, and ongoing development and testing of a CJW evaluation metric that abides by the principles of Indigenous data sovereignty and policy, this project is at once advancing science, law, and justice. It is also contributing to legal aid efforts by demonstrating that a culturally-appropriate, spatially-responsive, and people-centered model of legal service delivery is possible.
The CIVIC Innovation Challenge is a collaboration with Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, and the National Science Foundation.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.