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Mississippi Narratives: Tales from the Pro Bono Trenches
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Creating an infrastructure for legal advocacy

With the advent of the 21st century, Mississippi no longer had concerted, statewide capacity to combat continuing problems of discrimination and poverty. In the 1960s and 1970s, nonprofit law firms provided critical legal support to Mississippi’s civil rights movement. In the 1980s and 1990s, federal funding from the Legal Services Corporation supported statewide advocacy for low-income people. As of 2002, the legal needs of Mississippi’s low-income people and communities of color were addressed by a committed and overwhelmed few.

In response, the Mississippi Center for Justice has committed itself to creating an infrastructure for legal advocacy that achieves social justice through multiple strategies. Equality continues to elude most Mississippians in the areas of housing access, fair credit, quality public education, consumer protection, voting rights, employment opportunities, and fair working conditions. If the Center were to employ only traditional methods of legal advocacy to address these problems, a focused effort in any one of these areas could occupy the full attention of a small staff. Instead, the Center economizes its resources and accomplishes its goals by enlisting existing legal talent within the state and recruiting additional resources to supplement local efforts.

The Center’s mission is put into action through four operating principles:

• Partnerships with leaders throughout the state: We convene stakeholders and connect communities with legal resources.

• Generating the legal community’s commitment: We work with local leaders to develop legal strategies supportive of their campaign objectives and organize legal talent to support community goals.

• Making every event a “call to action” event: We convene people in a way that generates commitments and causes “breakthroughs” in enrollment of leaders and legal talent.

• Seeking, celebrating, and adapting models that work: We publicize and celebrate community and legal leadership examples that serve as inspirations, role models, and blueprints for action.