Legally Yours: Who is LSNF?

Legally Yours: Who is LSNF?

Charlotte Waters and Kathy Grunewald introduce “Legally Yours,” a civil legal education series by Legal Services of North Florida, serving a 16-county North Florida Panhandle area from Pensacola to Tallahassee. They explain who may qualify for free civil legal aid, how to apply for services, and that they do not handle criminal, personal injury, or traffic cases. They preview upcoming episodes focused on disaster-related legal issues and describe services ranging from advice and brief services to full representation, plus outreach through clinics, community education, partnerships, and two accessible mobile offices used to reach rural communities and libraries.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Hello and welcome to Legally Yours, a civil legal education series with Legal Services of North Florida, funded by Legal Services Corporation. My name is Charlotte Waters. I am the communications director at Legal Services of North Florida. And with me today I have Kathy. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Thanks, Charlotte. I'm Kathy Greenwald, the Senior Disaster Coordination Attorney here at Legal Services in North Florida and the Tallahassee office. Down the road, we're going to talk a little bit more about disaster legal issues. Actually, we're going to talk a lot more about disaster legal issues. But for right now, Charlotte and I just want to introduce our program to you and the kind of work that uh we do here at Legal Services in North Florida.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Yes, so both of us have been with Legal Services for quite a number of years and in the legal aid community. And so we're really excited to bring education in a new format. And we look forward to hearing what you guys think and how we can make it better. So Legal Services in North Florida is one of seven LSC grantees across the state of Florida. We serve the North Florida panhandle all the way from Escambia County to Jefferson, which is a 16-county area. We do provide civil legal help to those who qualify for our services at no cost for our services. We work in dozens of different categories of civil legal aid. And while we're excited to talk about disaster, we look forward to continuing the conversation in other areas as well. So that's a little bit about what we do. Let's talk about the people that we serve. And in particular, we can definitely talk that talk about what that means in the disaster community as well. And so there are many different ways to qualify. We encourage people, if they're interested, to reach out to us and apply online. The beautiful thing is all of us across the state of Florida do work really well together, and we're really good at helping each other help the client getting to the legal service agency that it needs to go to. So with that being said, um let's talk a little bit about the communities that we serve as well. Can you talk to us?

SPEAKER_00 2:17

Okay, and I want to add to please do getting our um to applying to legal services in North Florida. Um besides going online to our website, uh you can also call us at uh 850-385-9007, or you can go online and just Google Florida Online Intake and you'll see the application and you'll be able to apply with that application as well. Um as Charlotte said, we serve the communities from the Florida Alabama border and Escambia County all the way over to Jefferson County. Um so people qualify for our services because they are low or middle income working uh people in our service area. Um, we also have special grants so that we can serve people maybe with disabilities or veterans or older people for the civil legal issues that we do. Now remember, we're not going to do criminal cases, uh, we're not gonna do personal injury cases or traffic cases. But if you have a civil legal legal issue, then we may be able to help you.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

Absolutely. And on our website at www.lsnf.org, you can find all kinds of different instances or examples of the areas that we work in. Again, across the state of Florida, there are many agencies that can help you. And in fact, there's over 130 LSC funded agencies, and we'll talk about that more in another episode, so you'll have to stay tuned. Uh, so that's a little bit about a very, very broad overview of kind of the people that we are here to serve and what we can do. Like Kathy said, we're really going to be focusing on disaster for the first few episodes. Um, and when it comes to disaster, um, there are many different areas and and types that people might not even realize. So maybe there's a broad overview without getting into too much detail that people don't even realize are considered disastering legal services.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Yeah, that that's true. Uh, when we first started talking about disaster legal issues, people would say, Why do you need a lawyer helping people recover from disasters? But what you may have found out already, if you have been a survivor of a disaster, is often the one thing that's keeping you from recovering is a disaster legal issue. That could be related to your rental property or the home that you own or a problem with your insurance company, or maybe you had to you lost a car in your in the disaster, you had damaged personal property, you had a ramp, and now it's destroyed. So all of those things are related to your disaster recovery. And so many of the things that happen to folks after they've been a survivor of a disaster is a disaster-related legal issue.

SPEAKER_01 5:22

Do you think most people realize that there are like they're facing a disaster legal issue? Do you think they see FEMA as a disaster legal service issue?

SPEAKER_00 5:33

No, I don't think they do. I don't think they do. So, but what we want people is don't think, don't sit there and say, I don't know if legal services will help me with this. I don't think this is an issue that they deal with. I don't think I'm qualified. Don't say that. Just give us a call or apply online. Go to the library if you need some help applying and let us decide if you're qualified for our services, if you're eligible, and that you have a legal issue that we can help you with. And if you do, then um hopefully we can get it started and resolve it. Um, and if it's a disaster-related legal issue, we can um improve your recovery or maybe even speed it up. I was talking about our justice on the block clinics that we do all over our service area. And one of the things that we do that we target seniors, but it's open to everyone, and that is Will's clinics. And so we'll go to maybe a senior center or some location in our service area and meet people there and complete the will and other advanced directives while they're there with the notary public and um witnesses so they can go forward and they have the papers that they need in for in the future. So that's that's another thing that we do to reach and help seniors in our service area. So when you say advanced directives, can you tell my non-etry without me doing this? Yes, I can. Well, one of course is a will, but generally you're you're talking about um designating people who can make decisions for you if you aren't able to make them. Could be health care decisions, it could be decisions regarding your property, and that's what we'll talk to your personal property or your uh home, your real property. Um, so and those are the kinds of things that we'll talk to you about because those are the kinds of things that seniors need to think about and we all need to think about for the future. Gotcha.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

Okay, so you had mentioned before we were talking about you know, veterans coming in and other people coming in and having legal issues. I didn't realize they had. Can people come into our offices and have more than one legal issue? Does that happen? Oh, all the time.

SPEAKER_00 7:54

Oh, okay. That that it would be really unusual for people to come in um that have only one legal problem. So a lot of people come in and they believe that they have this legal problem and they may have that legal problem. But let's just take an example. You come in to see us because you've been served papers, maybe foreclosure or maybe an eviction. So, of course, your problem is a foreclosure or an eviction, but we're we'll talk to you and find out maybe you're behind on your foreclosure or eviction because you've lost your job and you've applied for unemployment, and maybe you were unsuccessful in getting that. So now you have an employment problem, and so that compounds that. And then so you don't have any income. So you may also be coming in and we'll say, ask you about what your other expenses are, and so maybe you have a car and you have to make payments on your car, like many people do, and now you don't have a job, so you don't have the money not only to pay for your housing, but to pay for your car, and so you're getting a letter from a debt collector or whoever the lender is for your um car payments about pay your bill, or um you know, we're going to come repossess your car. Um, so those kinds of issues come up. So, what looks like one problem can really be the result of problems that happened before that that were you just didn't know what to do or you didn't recognize them at that time. So it sounds like it can snowball really quickly.

SPEAKER_01 9:41

Yes. So coming in and asking questions early is better than not asking at all.

SPEAKER_00 9:47

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

Okay. And I do know some other areas that we've built content on. I mean, we've kind of covered quite a bit. Another area that we serve is victims' rights, which is kind of a very broad term, which I think is it's very grant language, but I know that can mean someone who's being stalked, someone who's um received any violent threats or have been physically assaulted, whether physical, sexual, whatever the case is. We have an entire special program that deals with that.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

Yep, that's right. Um, and if um if somebody finds themselves in that situation, they should call us immediately for assistance. And so that can be like Charlotte said, all kinds of different issues and show up in all kinds of different ways. Um, and that's something that we have a whole unit of people that work here at Legal Services in North Florida that can assist with those kinds of issues for people who are victims of crimes. Gotcha. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 10:48

And I think, you know, uh the hard part is uh one of the things that I've seen is sometimes we don't see ourselves, and nobody wants to see themselves as a victim. And and in so many ways, the people who go through these things, they are stronger than even I can imagine, having to stay standing and going through some of this. Um, and so it's difficult to see yourself that way. It's just terminology, and a lot of times there's a form that our clients will fill out and not even realize that things that have happened to them are not okay, they're not appropriate. And you know, hopefully we'll talk later in the series and give some really good examples. Uh, so it makes more sense to what we mean when we say these things. Um, but I think sometimes we use legal language.

SPEAKER_00 11:32

It's hard to put ourselves in that place. Uh oh, I agree, I agree. And what you said is right. We're gonna get somebody to come here who that is their specialty at legal services of North Florida, who they can talk about it in a way that that everyone will understand and maybe learn something, but go, wait a minute, that's happened to me. Maybe I should go in and talk to them. Doesn't hurt to go in and talk to us. One, I I want to make it clear it's free, it's free civil legal aid, right? Um, and so it doesn't hurt to come in, make an appointment and talk to someone to see if it's a legal issue that we can assist you with or give you some advice. So one of the things that we haven't mentioned, and you may be we're gonna ask about this, is what do we actually do for people? And that is we may do brief service, uh write a letter, um, help you uh respond to something, but we can do that counsel and advice all the way up to full representation at a bench trial, which is a trial just before a judge, or a jury trial. We all know what a jury trial is, I think.

SPEAKER_01 12:49

Yes, and I may need some clarification. So when you say brief services, what what does that mean for someone? Does that mean like we're taking on your case?

SPEAKER_00 13:02

We're gonna give you some advice and help you um with whatever it is. We're gonna do if brief service is gonna help you solve your problem because maybe it's a letter um to somebody, or maybe it's a notarizing a document that you need to move forward, then that might be what we do for you. So it will depend on what you need, what we're going to do. It could be different.

SPEAKER_01 13:28

Absolutely. So something could be, you know, I need help filling out this document, and that could be brief services, but the organization may not take on the client for full representation because it was a simple here we didn't need to. Didn't need to. Right. Very simple. All right, that makes more sense. So we've got advice, legal service, brief services, full representation, this bench trial thing. And then when we were talking about outreaches, so that's another way for people to get help in the community. Is that a place where people get advice in the brief services?

SPEAKER_00 14:07

Can be, depending on the outreach. So I think a lot of people like, how do I find out about you? What what do you do? If you're if you're not listening to this podcast, or if you listen to this podcast and you want to know more about it, then we do do outreach all over our service area. And so what is outreach? It's showing up at a fair. Um, it may be something in your community. Right now, we're going to the back-to-school bashes. And so we set up a table where we have folks there who are our outreach specialists and people who are out in the community more often to give out brochures, to tell you how to apply, to give you information. So that's one kind of outreach. Another kind of outreach is, of course, the clinics that we talked about. And so you go there, um the attorneys will be there, you complete an application, and then talk to an attorney about your legal issue. Sometimes those clinics may be advice only, so we'll give you advice to move you forward with your legal question, um, or it may be, as I said, you know, more representation all the way up to a trial if that's necessary. So that's a really another kind of justice on the block clinic. That's where we go to where people are. Um, the other thing that we really like to do is community education. Uh, that's so that is if your club, your church, your nonprofit, your workplace is interested in legal services, or the people that work there want to know about what we do to help their clients, then we will gladly go to your place of work or your place of worship or your club to talk about our services and we'll like tailor it to what you're interested in. For me, because I do disaster work, I'm going out and I'm talking about disaster-related legal issues. But somebody else may go out. You may think, I'm not interested in disaster-related legal issues here at my organization, but we'd love to know what you do about helping families or helping victims of domestic violence. So one of our attorneys who specializes in that can go out, do community education to give you the information to give that group or your group the information that you need to help your clients. So remember it it, you know, it's not just at the person at the club or organization learning about it, but often they are out helping other people. Yeah. Um, and a lot of those people are the clients that we serve um or that could be our clients. Um, so they can help them get to us in the right way. That's a good point.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

So, you know, this this is a form of community education, and we love getting in front of people, we love talking about legal services. That's true. Um, we get very excited about it. I have plenty of family members who don't bring up certain topics because they lovingly don't want to hear it again, I'm sure. Uh, and so it sounds like what you're saying is there could be someone in the community that's serving similar clients that we can serve. And so coming to that group or being part of a club, we're letting them know, and that's letting the community know how to refer to us, how to, how to educate their audiences to know what kind of additional services they have in us as well.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

Yeah, and I think that's really important because there's a lot of people that live in our service area in the panhandle, and we like to think that they all know about us when they don't. But they might know another group or be a part of a group that somebody knows about us, and so it expands our reach to the people that we serve, but it also gives the group that we're educating the information that they need to give their folks a full spectrum of the kind of assistance they can get at legal services or other organizations.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And so we encourage you to follow us and share and like all of the things that we produce so that we can get the message further out into the community as well. And again, as an on-attory, I really appreciate these perspectives because even being here for as long as I have, I am constantly learning new things. So we talked a little bit about really everything. Um, you know, the last thing we were talking, we were gonna talk about a little bit about how we get the word out. The clinics are a great description of that. Our Justice on the Block clinics, that's that is legal services in our Florida. It's the terminology we use to express how we bring our offices to the community, to the street that the person is on. A lot of our service area is rural. And so, with that being the case, even though we have our five branches that you can go to, if you're in California County or Liberty, that can still be a 45-minute drive. And so there are different ways that we get out into the community, and I think it'd be really fun to talk about. Some of the ways that we get out there is we have vehicles that get us out there, and I think it'd be kind of cool to talk about that. Yeah. Um, yeah, they have been uh a lot in the making. Um, they come from, even though they come from our disaster grants, they serve the entire area in every area of law. Would you like to tell us about tell us about our offices?

SPEAKER_00 19:43

Yeah, we have two mobile offices, which we kind of nickname them um Justice on the Block on the Move. And one of them is a full-size RV, and most people know how big Winnebago is, so it's big. Oh, I know. I had to drive it once. Yeah, very big. Yeah, it's basically that size, and then we have a smaller one that's the size of an ambulance, about that size. Both of them have offices in them, and they're both set up so we can talk to uh the two attorneys can be talking to two different people, but have privacy, so they are doors. Um, they're also accessible by anyone. Um, you can get in there and get out easily if you're using a wheelchair or you need some assistance. And the wonderful thing about them is that as Charlotte said, we can take them in the country, in the rural area, which we try to do, not so much in the summer because it's kind of hot to be outside, but we do we have done that in one of the places that we often go or to the libraries, and so that's local libraries is one way that we reach the rural communities by going to the branch libraries, by driving one of our mobile offices to the branch libraries and setting up out there. Or if it's really hot or rainy, um the librarians um will have us come inside and um talk to them there. But um, yeah, those mobile offices are great for reaching areas that we um don't get to very often, or we don't, you know, that we don't have an office there. They're also great advertising for us because they're huge and they're all branded with uh at legal services in North Florida. So if you see one sitting somewhere in a field somewhere or in front of a library, uh stop by and visit us. Say hi, take a photo and tag us. Right, yeah. Let us know where you see them on the move. Yeah, right. That's great. Yeah, that's a great idea. You saw them on the move somewhere.

SPEAKER_01 21:56

Exactly. Yeah. So those are really great resources to get out there. To get our attorneys in front of people and also to let people know, like we know it's difficult to get to us. We understand that we have rural spaces. And across Florida, there's a lot of rural spaces. We're all sort of trying to find ways to meet clients where they are, especially because we know across this particular area, you know, it's hard to get those bus systems out further into the country, or there aren't any. There's just no infrastructure there. So the goal is to serve those areas. And so we welcome knowing, you know, where is it that people think that we should be? Where are the gaps? And while we are doing the best we can to figure out and mitigate where the gaps are, uh, it's always good to hear from the community and learn where they want to see us and meet them there, especially as partners who want to support us getting into those areas. Uh, we love it. You've been you've spent many years partnering with the libraries who are our dear best friends and have been huge supporters of us parking that bus outside and having mobile tours across the across our service area. Uh, we also will partner with other agencies. Uh, we partnered with community legal services down in Flor in Orlando, Florida. Uh, that was great. We were able to go right after Hurricane Ian and take one of our mobile offices down there. Uh, so that's the beauty of it. Again, being able to collaborate with the other legal services grantees and legal aids is really beneficial because at the end of the day, the purpose is to serve as many clients as possible. To get in front of as many people as possible.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

Yeah, and one thing we've done with these mobile units that's really kind of fun is um, and you and you probably haven't thought about it if you've had a touch a truck touch a truck event. Yeah. Um, but if you're having a touch-a-truck event, invite legal services because we got a truck, sorta, that people can come in and touch. We had a big RV Winnebago.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

That's right. We've got some cute little stickers and cute things. We've got our um our uh our RV is a character and a very cute one.

SPEAKER_00 24:12

Yeah, so we we go to those touch a truck events because the they're usually very popular with that local community. Uh-huh. You know, a lot of families come to that, and so they some of them will come and they haven't heard of us yet. And they may and they may never need our services. But if they do, they're able to pick up the information in order to apply, and then you know, a couple of years down the road something comes up, and then they'll go, Hey, wait a minute. I saw them at that touch a truck event, and then have the information, or at least know that we exist, and they can call, um, see if we can give them some help. Like that.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

So, do you think we've kind of given a good exhaustive overview about the work we do at L SNF? I hope so. I hope so. Don't worry. That was our goal. You'll get sick of us. We have lots more to talk about, especially once we start talking about disaster. Um, and we look forward to being able to do that. So for now, this is just a little bit about how to reach us, who we are. We'll have more information in the text associated with this video, or if you're listening to this podcast, we're really excited that you joined us. Uh, we would love your feedback. Just DM us and let us know what you think or reply. But for now, signing off Legally Yours with Charlotte Waters and Legally Yours with Kathy Greenwald.