Legally Bond
Legally Bond
An Interview with Sal Curran, Volunteer Lawyers Project of Central New York
This special Pro Bono Week episode of Legally Bond is a repost of Kim's conversation with Sal Curran, executive director of the Volunteer Lawyers Project of Central New York. Sal discusses the impressive reach of VLPCNY as well as the extensive services the staff and volunteer lawyers provide.
Learn more about the Volunteer Lawyers Project of Central New York, here.
Hello and welcome to Legally Bond, a podcast presented by the law firm Bond Schenick King. I'm your host, kim Wolf-Price. On today's episode we'll be talking with Sal Curran, executive Director of Volunteer Lawyers Project of Central New York, from its website. Volunteer Lawyers Project of CNY is a 501c3 nonprofit legal aid organization, so please feel free to go to the website and make donations.
Speaker 1:That provides free legal information, assistance and representation in civil legal matters to low-income people in Central New York and you'll find out that the definition of Central New York has gotten much bigger over the last few years, I think here and the services are provided by staff and volunteer attorneys, and we're going to learn a little bit more about how that works. Of course, paralegals and law students help out as well, so welcome to the podcast, Sam.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this. We get to work together once in a while, but I'm amazed by the work you've done with the organization, so I'm looking forward to talking to you. So my thought for today is we can talk about the work of VLP, the importance of pro bono and legal practice and who VLP serves, VLP of CNY specifically, so that maybe we can connect people in need of services while also inspiring some attorneys and other people to engage in pro bono work. Is that an okay plan?
Speaker 1:That sounds like a dream. I love that. All right. So before we begin, it's a tradition on the podcast to ask our guests to talk a bit about their background, so that listeners know who's speaking. So would you mind taking a few minutes and telling us a little bit about your background? I mean, if you want to talk about where you're from law school, undergrad, family, whatever you feel works.
Speaker 3:Sure. So I went to law school at City University of New York in Queens. It is a public interest law school, proud graduate of there. For my undergraduate, I got two bachelor's degrees, one in women and gender studies and one in Spanish language, from the University of Maine in Orono, which is where I'm from originally. I'm from not from Orono, but from Maine, and, in terms of family, I am married to a wonderful woman, fabiola, who is a labor rights organizer, and we have two fantastic children. I have a four-year-old son, silvio, and a 10-month-old Ramona, and a very old crotchety pug Boston Terrier mix is in the mix as well.
Speaker 3:So it's a busy household here, full of a lot of joy and a lot of passion to try to make the world a better place. So it's a good life.
Speaker 1:I love it. That's fantastic. Thank you for that, and so all right. So you said you grew up in Maine and then you went to the City University of New York, cuny, down in Queens. What was your road to Volunteer Lawyers Project of Central New York? Where did you work before you joined the organization? How'd you get here?
Speaker 3:So right after law school I started working in legal services down in the city and then was feeling a little bit burnt out on that big city life at the time and so I got admitted to practice law up in Maine as well and had a private practice up there for a few years and that gave me some interesting perspectives on what it means to practice as a lawyer. I had some phenomenal mentors. I was mainly doing family law and court appointed work. I sort of joked that I was a self-funded legal aid org because I would take paid family law and divorce cases to fund all the guardian ad litem and pro bono work.
Speaker 1:I was doing Nothing surprises me about that, yeah.
Speaker 3:And I learned a lot about what the role that pro bono has. During that time I got to explore new areas of practice and meet new attorneys and sort of build my reputation in the community through the pro bono work and I really loved it. And then my wife applied for a PhD program here at Syracuse University so I said, well, I'm admitted in New York, so why don't we give it a try? And I applied for the position at the Volunteer Lawyers Project at that time and sold them on all that I had learned about pro bono during my private practice and got the job which at the time was for a very small program and have had the pleasure of growing the program these past 11 years. And so what it?
Speaker 1:is. That's great. Well, thank you to Syracuse University for bringing Fabiola into the program for PhD, and then, of course, you here. That's fantastic. So did you know you always wanted to be an attorney, definitely not.
Speaker 3:No, I thought I wanted to work in women's rights, perhaps like international women's rights. I actually, after undergrad, started a master's in social sciences and gender studies down in Santiago, chile, and did a semester there, and while I was getting sort of like deeply engaged in the like academic, philosophical world, I started realizing no, this isn't what I want to do. I actually want to help people on a real face-to-face kind of level. I want to be like really using my passion in a more practical way. And so I came back to the US US and started studying for law school and decided to go to a public interest law school with the idea of really wanting to learn how to help the community that I cared so much about.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think those journeys are important because people think like, oh, everyone knows they want to be a lawyer forever, or people have it set. But it's true that even folks who are really successful sometimes it's a little more circuitous path. That's right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I during the time of studying for law school I actually volunteered at and then eventually was hired to run a community resource room at like a community resource center out in San Francisco where I was living at the time, and that job in many ways very deeply informs my work at Volunteer Lawyers Project as well. So there are so many different random experiences in the past that when you weave them together make a lot of sense for somebody who is directing a pro bono program.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I think that's fantastic and I really appreciate you sharing the background because I think I don't know. I think it tells people a lot about lawyers and it helps to get to know the person you're listening to on the podcast episode. So I appreciate that, thank you. Maybe we should do some of the basics, because maybe I'm using acronyms, and so tell us a little bit about VLP. What is VLP and what is the organization's mission.
Speaker 3:Sure, the Volunteer Lawyers Project of Central New York is a legal aid organization that is really a gap filler organization. So we provide access to justice through engaging the legal community and volunteer service to those in need. So on the ground, practically what that looks like is we look at the interweaving web of available legal services for those who can't afford an attorney and we say where are those?
Speaker 2:gaps.
Speaker 3:Because really it's more like a colander than a bowl. Right, there are far fewer resources than are needed in the community, even in a place like Syracuse, which is resource rich. Can we engage the legal community and sometimes the non-legal community to undergrads and other volunteers to meet these needs? So, for example, back in 2017, we did a broad scale community legal needs survey and through that process, we discovered that debt and financial issues were a significant percentage of the legal issues that people were facing, and when we then gathered together a group of all the legal aid organizations doing work in that area, we came to realize that there were very few legal aid attorneys in our region who were focusing on debt, and so we said, okay, this is definitely a community need. And then we looked to other legal aid orgs around the state and around the country for models of how they were engaging volunteer attorneys in this work, and in 2019, we rolled out our Claro Community Debt Program just before the pandemic.
Speaker 3:So it is now. We're now in our post-pandemic figuring out how best to weave in volunteers. But I just think that's a really recent and clear example of the way that we, you know, we identify a need, we look for models and then we bring in volunteers. We do trainings, we roll it out with a CLE training about debt and how to serve low income community members and then, kick it off.
Speaker 1:Right, it's so important. I heard a speaker years ago say is, and it was in a criminal justice sense, but it's similar if you talk about social justice. Is the justice we seek, the justice they need, and that's what you look at, what is the need? And it's so important to have that kind of information and data drive and inform the decision-making, because that's who you want to serve.
Speaker 3:Exactly, we have really two clients. We have the community we serve and then we have the volunteers wanting to make sure that they have a good experience. But the volunteer part always has to follow the client need, and so we really do look not only to need surveys but to the expertise of the community-based organizations that we work with, to client stories, to the voices on our board and our programs committee that represent the community, to all inform what are the most pressing needs in our community.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I have to say, Sal, your work as executive director, it's really been amazing. I think that I came back to Syracuse about the same time and to watch everything grow. Will you talk a little bit about the VLP when you first came and then how you grew the organization?
Speaker 3:Absolutely so. The Volunteer Lawyers Project was actually founded back in 1991 by someone who will be familiar to folks who listen to a Bond podcast by Judge George Lowe.
Speaker 1:Yes, he is pretty famous here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, he was the OCB at Onondaga County Bar Association president that year and he worked to get an IOLA grant to found the organization and hired Tony Jawadi another familiar name to many hopefully not that familiar since he ran attorney grievance for a long time, but maybe familiar from CLEs and hired him at that time he had been over at Neighborhood Legal Services to set up this promoter program. And so then for the next about almost 25 years it was a program of the Onondaga County Bar Association and it had really it almost never had attorney staff. It only did for those first few years and then it was. It was all paralegal and pro bono coordinator staff. And so when I came in in 2012, the wonderful Deb O'Shea, who many people will remember, was the pro bono coordinator and she was just working so hard to bring services to the community I can't speak highly enough about Deb and the amazing work she was doing. She was running an eviction defense program, defense program, an uncontested divorce program and the you know talk to a lawyer clinic nonprofit program. So she really had a lot of things going on with the support of the pro bono practices group and when they hired me and brought me in, they did so with the idea of spinning the organization off into its own nonprofit, with the idea that there was a lot more unmet legal need out there in the community than was currently being addressed.
Speaker 3:So I got hired and we started right away with the process of filing the articles of incorporation during the 501c3. It was really wild Building a board, a really fantastic governance board, and my job was really to start assessing needs and building out new programs. So we really grew the organization by identifying one need at a time and building it out one grant at a time. The first programs we built out pretty quickly as we got additional funding from the court system, were our family court program, where we help unrepresented litigants complete petitions to get into court. Our surrogate court program, where we have elder law and trust and estates attorneys provide advice and counsel and brief assistance with surrogate court and elder law matters. And our immigration program, where at that time we had experienced immigration providers providing advice and counsel, because at that time there was only one immigration attorney working at a legal aid org for like 15 counties, I mean, which is wild to think now because we have literally dozens you know a dozen.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, that's how we built it out was sort of one need at a time, and it's been slow and steady since then. When I started it, there was two of us and we had a budget of 150,000. And now there are 24 of us. There need to be 26. We're in the process of hiring two legal assistants that's great and we have a budget of almost $3 million. So it's really grown a lot in the last 11 years.
Speaker 1:And I think the part about that growth from $150 to $3 million is that each time you have to go find that funding, apply for that funding there's, whether it's grants, the court. However, it is like that growth is strategic, but it's an intense process.
Speaker 3:It truly is. It truly is Anybody that thinks that a legal aid attorney has it easier because they don't have the billable hour. They don't realize that every grant comes with its own equivalent of the billable hour. They don't realize that every grant comes with its own equivalent of the billable hour.
Speaker 3:That's what I used to try to say to students Every interaction is recorded, every outcome is reported extensively. It's really its own culture of how you're reporting back what you're doing and translating it to the community. You know and I'll say that in the early years we grew largely through legal aid grants. We were very fortunate to have the Office of Court Administration increasing its judiciary civil legal services funding in those first few years. But in more recent years the growth has come through partnerships. So all of our new funding in the last four years I think, has come through partnerships with other agencies, whether they're other legal aid groups or we partnered with major social services providers, smaller social services providers.
Speaker 3:I think a big part of what I've tried to do in this community is help the social services providers, the government actors and everyone realize that legal assistance is actually part of a complex web of needs. So if you create a program to help entrepreneurs, you need to have attorneys providing legal assistance to those entrepreneurs. And if you create a program to help job seekers, you need to have lawyers help those job seekers overcome the barriers to employment. And if you create a program for housing stability, you need lawyers to help people fight evictions that are unjust. And if you create a program to help at-risk veterans. You need lawyers to help people overcome the legal barriers to stability, and we've been really successful in that. And I say we because while I'm like the head of, you know, the executive director I have the most phenomenal team of lawyers and non-lawyers.
Speaker 3:Oh, they're amazing. And so it's not just me out there in the community telling people this, it's very much the whole team is out there spreading the word about the work that lawyers can do and the role we can play in transformative change in the community.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have to say it's really inspiring and great leadership and I always appreciate the chance to work with you and your team because it's just a group of people just dedicated to what you all do and our community. You know where we live and where we want always to hopefully make things better. So the need in most communities across our country for legal services, particularly for individuals who may not have resources to pay or find a lawyer, is tremendous, and BLP serves a large number of clients over a vast amount of space. Now I mean this is like the counties. The geographic reach has changed. Can you tell us a little bit about?
Speaker 3:that it's true. So we handled over 4,000 legal cases in the last year, and those cases were in about 45 of the counties of New York State 45 out of 62 total.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it may have even been 50.
Speaker 3:So, to be clear, the vast majority of our cases take place in Central New York and you know I truly mean like Onondaga County, oswego, Cayuga, oneida, madison, jefferson, those are.
Speaker 3:The majority of our cases are in that area, that's still a lot, yes, but we have a few programs that have a much broader geographic scope. In particular, our immigration program stretches all the way from Plattsburgh and, in terms of direct representation here to Onondaga County for additional pro bono support, all the way out to Buffalo in collaboration with the Volunteer Lawyers Project of Erie County Bar Association. And then our LGBTQIA rights program, which really focuses primarily on transgender rights and does transgender name changes throughout the state, has services. We provide services anywhere outside of New York City, and so that's where all these different counties come in. We have name change clients in just about every county you can imagine. So it's really expanded geographically. And the reason it's expanded geographically is because the need is there.
Speaker 3:In many of these counties there's no dedicated pro bono services program. Every county has some level of pro bono services through the legal services corporation funded agencies that have a requirement to do here in Onondaga County. Many of these other counties have very few attorneys and very few attorneys with the expertise that we have here in Onondaga County. So what can we do to get the help out to those in need? And so that's what we've done over these past really five years. That growth has happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's tremendous growth. And so you mentioned that you have a fantastic staff, which is completely true, and that's the lawyers and your support team beyond the lawyers, and also I'm always impressed how long many folks have stayed, which is another testament to the organization and your leadership is to. You know that people are digging in and staying to grow these programs, but there's no way you could cover all of that with 24, hopefully 26 people. So let's talk a little bit about how you know your staff also works with volunteer lawyers, hence the name. So will you talk a little bit about the volunteer lawyers model in legal services and how that works?
Speaker 3:So most of the attorneys that we have on staff are extremely experienced practitioners, and there's a reason for that it's because we try to provide opportunities for volunteer attorneys and law students where they feel comfortable, maybe stepping outside of their comfort zone, to be able to provide legal assistance to those in need. So we, our model, is to provide coordination of volunteers, mentorship and supervision of volunteers and really an opportunity in place for people to grow their legal practice in a pro bono setting. And so we have 14 attorneys and 10 non-attorneys and then together we try to make it a really seamless experience for the volunteer attorneys. We have a couple of different models. We have the ones that are based on sort of a regular schedule, a clinic, whether that's eviction court, where you know, certain day of the week, bond attorneys go in and they have the support of the attorneys and pro bono coordinators and paralegals to take on cases and work those cases where it might be a limited one-time appearance or it might be a full scope, taking on a case to completion. And we have similar short models to make it easy for the pro bono volunteers to digest, to take it on out at talk to a lawyer, family court clinic, surrogate court clinic, that kind of thing. Then we have models where the volunteer can take on full representation cases and I think the most recent big push we've had around this that's a great example is our immigration program.
Speaker 3:So there are very few immigration attorneys in the private practice that have experience doing asylum law. It is just not the kind of law that makes private attorneys money, because it's very labor intensive and the folks that are applying for asylum usually do not have any resources. So what we did is, when Afghanistan collapsed and we had hundreds of Afghan arrivals come to central New York, we created an asylum panel where we did multiple hours of training. And now we have this panel of about two dozen volunteer attorneys who have agreed to take on asylum cases and they get assigned a case, they get assigned a law student to help them do the extensive country conditions research they need help with and they work that case, they prepare it, they submit it, they go with the client to the interview and hopefully they have success. We've just started getting back some results and we've had some success. We had a young woman from Afghanistan who had actually been studying to be a lawyer who we helped get asylum, which is really exciting who we helped get asylum, which is really exciting, and the volunteers are getting constant, ongoing support from our very experienced immigration attorneys. They have open office hours. We have a resource bank of sample country conditions, sample memos of law, sample applications, everything. So that's really, I think, a great example of the way that we can engage volunteer attorneys in something super meaningful that's outside of their regular practice.
Speaker 3:At the same time, we've been really focusing on building out our small business and entrepreneurship program, where that's largely with programs like Center State, ceo, syracuse, urban Partnership, wise, women's Business, small Business Development Center. So we have all these different sources that are feeding us cases where there are low income entrepreneurs often minority owned, women business owned and what we do is we do the intake, we really understand their need, we make sure they have a business plan in place so that they have some viability to them, and then we place those cases out with business law attorneys, because that is an area that there's real wealth in our private practice community to take on those cases and there's no legal aid attorneys that do that area of practice. It's just not something that is part of the like traditional basket of legal aid services. So you know we go in both directions. We go both to the. We know you have this area of expertise. We'll feed you these really good cases and we know you don't have this area of expertise. We're going to really mentor you through this.
Speaker 1:That's great. So how do you encourage attorneys from outside of your agency to participate?
Speaker 3:So there are so many different ways that we do this. You know we provide CLE who otherwise might not be able to actually interact with clients. We like to make sure they're getting lots of client experience. We provide pro bono CLE credits, primary malpractice insurance and I think overall, our goal is to provide a feeling like you're making a difference, even if it's just in one person's life, and that's, I would say, that's the same way that we've retained so much staff is. We focus a lot on the values of how we're providing the work, that we're part of a solution, that we're going to do whatever we can to help whoever is in need, and that might be brief advice and counsel, that might be full representation. Whatever it is, we're going to try to provide something so that when the person leaves, they're in a better position than they were when they came.
Speaker 1:And some things are as simple as if it's the short term sort of talk to a lawyer, actually listening to the person who comes in.
Speaker 3:It makes a huge difference. Yeah, and even just translating what they're saying to legal language so they can go get the help they need. Yes, sometimes people will come in and their life has so many complications going on and you listen and you can kind of unthread it and be like, oh, this is a cognizable legal issue. Go say this to the attorney.
Speaker 1:Exactly, this is the point. So you have all of these great programs, but the other pieces that you have to and there is a great need you have to find a way to reach the clients and let them know about the services. So that's another whole piece of your organization, isn't it?
Speaker 3:Outreach is a fundamental part. Connecting with the community is a fundamental part and it is, for us, largely done through community partnerships. We know we can't be everywhere all at once and we're not going to be buying billboards or anything like that to get the word out.
Speaker 3:folks at Catholic Charities and Salvation Army and Interfaith Works and all these trusted community partners Workers Center, the New York Immigration Coalition, all these different groups out in the community know about us and they are our trusted partners out there in the community connecting people to us. So I often say that sometimes people don't even know that they're coming to Volunteer Lawyers Project. They just know they're going to the Family Court Clinic.
Speaker 2:They just know they're going to the.
Speaker 3:Westcott Legal Clinic and I should say the court is actually one of our largest referring partners. We work very closely with the court system and with the clerks in the different courts and provide services right on site, whether it's eviction defense, family court, circuit court. We had a debt court clinic in the court at one point. Now they have our flyers up all over the clerk's office, so you know we work very closely with where people go when they're looking for help, to make it easy for them to connect with us.
Speaker 1:That's so important, because having all these wonderful services, if people need them, can't access them or don't know about them, they can't go anywhere. That's why these community partnerships and I'm glad to hear that the court is such a big part of that as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it definitely is.
Speaker 1:So pro bono is critical to our profession, our communities and our society. So what would you say to an attorney or a law student in any geographic market who's hesitant about engaging in pro bono work? Who comes with the? I don't have time response.
Speaker 3:When I had my private practice. To this day, some of the most meaningful work that I did was my pro bono work. It is the kind of thing where you leave it feeling like you really changed somebody's life and you get to learn new skills. You get opportunities to practice in new areas of law. You get opportunities to meet people that you never would have met Lawyers and non-lawyers, even clients. You can really learn. I think you learn and gain more from it than you give, and I think that the best way to do that is just to make a commitment that you're going to do this. This will just be part of the schedule. You know it'll be part of what you do, whether that's a commitment to staff a certain clinic a certain number of days a year or it's a commitment to take on a certain number of cases at once. I know when I had my private practice, I staffed a monthly clinic for three hours a month Plus.
Speaker 3:I always had at least one ongoing pro bono case at a time and it worked out great because the ebbs and flows of how cases work. It never took over my practice in a way that seriously dinged my ability to support my family. It might for one week out of the whole year, but the rest of the time it really didn't and it also made it manageable. I said, okay, this is the one I'm doing right now. So if anybody reached out and said, can you take another? No, right now I'm doing this one, and then I would work that one as hard as I could get it done and I take on the next one.
Speaker 3:And so sometimes there'd be more than one full rep case a year. There might be two or three, depending on how long it took. But I just think pro bono, volunteer work, it's the kind of thing that you just make a commitment to, like flossing your teeth, right, you just do it, and it makes you healthier and makes you happier. And I'm not saying every interaction is perfect by any means, because humans are complex and behind every pro bono case is a human being you know, but it really is so valuable.
Speaker 3:So that's what I tell people and I believe that I that's what it was for me and still is for me. Like I, I love to jump in at our different clinics the ones that I have expertise on, because I do not have expertise on everything, but I love jumping in here and there and filling in because the client stories are just so compelling. Clients' lives are so compelling, and being able to help out it makes you feel better about what you're doing day to day, absolutely, and it's just an important way to about what you're doing day to day.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and it's just an important way to feel like you're part of a bigger community and engaged. And you're right, it's got to become a habit. I mean I have I still have the card a client drew for my oldest son like, and it's in his baby book. I just love that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I love that. It just is so meaningful.
Speaker 1:It is, it's really meaningful, and you have to sort of make it a habit, to make it part of what you do.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And also to donate to places like VLP of Central New York, on the website or elsewhere, to help these legal services agencies. You know have 26 or 28 employees to keep doing this great work.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, kim, it's interesting because most of our funding comes through government grants and private philanthropy. You know foundations and things, but the portion of our funding that comes through private fundraising is absolutely the most critical funding we have. Because and I'm not sure the extent to which folks who don't live in the nonprofit world know this but each grant caps the amount that we can spend on what they call admin and what the rest of the world would call the fundamentals of running an organization. So they'll cap how much you can spend to be able to run your organization. They want you to do all client services without realizing that they're asking you to provide all this information. So you've got to have computers, you've got to have systems to keep track of cases, you've got to have all the unglamorous stuff. And without our private fundraising we absolutely could not stay in business. We just could not.
Speaker 3:And the other thing is these grants. They come and go often, you know you get, especially when you're doing private foundation they'll only want to fund you for a year or three years or whatever it is, and then. So you're always playing out. Well, I'm always playing this game of trying to find what's the next source. What's the next source.
Speaker 3:How can we keep these programs that are so critical to our community going, and sometimes there's a gap between two different grants. One ends in February, the next one doesn't start till May and you need to be able to fill that in. And again, those private fundraising dollars are the thing that allows us the flexibility to do that. So I have to give a huge thank you to Bonchunik and King. Bonchunik and King does this wonderful donation every year where the law firm provides direct support and then a match of what the attorneys donate, and the attorneys every year have gone and donated more than the match amount. It's been amazing and I and all of the folks at Volunteer Lawyers Project are just so grateful to the generosity of the bond attorneys and I can say you're making a difference at our agency.
Speaker 3:You're making a difference with the time you devote and you're making a difference with the time you devote and you're making a difference with the donations that you give and we just appreciate it so much.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, we all appreciate your organization and the work you do, and now we just need to up those volunteer hours. But you and I will work on that.
Speaker 3:You know, kim, I am excited to say that in about a month and don't quote me on the exact day, because we haven't set a launch date yet but in about a month we're going to be launching a new pro bono opportunities portal on our website where we will be listing individual cases that are available for representation, and so when that launches we'll be making a big deal about it. You'll all be getting email blasts. We're definitely going to do a CLE to roll it out and let people know about it and hopefully come around to the different law firms to show everyone as well. But I'm hoping it's going to make it easier for people to, on their lunch break, say hey, you know, I don't have a pro bono case right now. I wonder if there's anything that looks interesting to me. So we'll see. That's our goal. We've been working really hard at VLP to figure out what are the things we can do to make it easier for people to plug in, and I'm hoping that portal will be one of the things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really think it will. I'm excited and more excited to have you come here and, for those of you who aren't in this market, I hope you'll engage with your volunteer lawyers project in whatever market you're in, because you know, bond, we're in many different markets across the state and it's just, I think it's so important for us. You know we work together as a legal community and that's the piece that I think makes the biggest impact when we do work together with whatever type of law we practice, whether we're in a legal services agency or in a private or government but that it's important that we're all part of one big push to make sure that we're doing the right thing.
Speaker 3:I love that it's so true. And it's true among the legal aid organizations too. I'm on the board of the New York Legal Services Coalition and we have almost 50 organizations across the state that are all doing this work, and so we talk a lot about the way we do our work and how we do our work and best practices. And it's true, it's. No one agency can do it on their own, and legal aid can't do it on its own. Like we are definitely all part of a fabric that together can meet the needs of our community.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Well. Thank you, sal. Thanks for joining us on the podcast today. Thanks for all the work you do, and I always enjoy our conversations and working with you. You had when I was teaching you had some pro bono scholars for me back in the day and now we get to work together that I'm at Bond, so I'm very excited for that. Thanks for the work you do, and to everybody at VLP, I know it makes a big difference in our community, so I look forward to talking to you soon. Maybe we'll have you back on the podcast to talk about the new system.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much, kim. I really appreciate it. Thank you to you and to all the folks at Bond, and keep up the great work. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thanks for tuning into this episode of Legally Bond. If you're listening and have any questions for me, want to hear from someone at the firm or have a suggestion for a future topic, please email us at legallybond at bskcom. Also, don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to Legally Bond wherever podcasts are downloaded. Until our next talk, be well.
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