The Forge

A conversation with some of the organizers behind The Forge, the new journal by and for organizers — PLUS: Off-Kilter takes a look at America’s “civil justice crisis.” Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

This week on Off-Kilter: “In a time of crisis, we know that no one is coming to save us; we must forge a new society, together. While the litany of challenges are for the most part self-evident — white supremacy, racial capitalism/neoliberalism, climate change, patriarchy, xenophobia, the assault on democracy, and more — our analysis isn’t always aligned, nor are our strategies and methods for making change. This is okay, because in a complex society such as ours, heterogeneity is a good thing. At the same time, we’ve come together because we know that we aren’t building and exercising the power to make durable, transformational change.”

These are the opening words of an essay by the Center for Popular Democracy’s Brian Kettenring, welcoming readers to The Forge, a new “journal by and for organizers” that launched last month. Rebecca sat down with Brian and two of his fellow organizers behind The Forge — Ericka Taylor and Holly Craig-Wehrle — to learn more about the project and the story behind its launch.

Later in the show… While civil legal aid programs exist in every state, funding barely provides one attorney for every 10,000 low-income Americans. And that figure doesn’t even include the tens of millions of Americans who struggle to pay for legal help because they do not qualify for free federal legal assistance. Complex courtroom procedures and underfunded civil courts make it almost impossible for the average person to go it alone, especially given all the advantages that wealthy landlords, financial institutions, and other powerful players have when they lawyer up. As a result of this “civil justice crisis,” each and every day, countless low-income people lose their homes, their health care, and even their children — simply because they can’t afford a lawyer.

So this week, Rebecca talks with Karen Lash and Maha Jweied, two former Obama Administration officials who helped to run the Office of Access to Justice, about America’s civil justice crisis, and what it will take to make the system work for everyone — not just those who can afford private lawyers.

This week’s guests:

• Brian Kettenring, editor, The Forge
• Ericka Taylor, publishing committee, The Forge
• Holly Craig-Wehrle, publishing committee, The Forge
• Karen Lash, senior fellow, Center for American Progress and former deputy director, Office of Access to Justice
• Maha Jweied, senior fellow, Center for American Progress and former acting director, Office of Access to Justice

For more on this week’s topics:

• Check out The Forge, read Brian’s essay about what it’s all about, and get in touch with the team to become a contributor
• For more on the civil justice crisis, dig in to Karen and Maha’s report, “Civil Justice Needs Federal Leadership,” — and for more on the fight for the civil right to counsel, check out the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel’s resource hub

This week’s transcript:

♪ sights to hit the class by the end of the day

hot from downtown into the hood where I stay

the only place I can afford ’cause my block ain’t saved

I spend most of my time working, trying to bring in…. ♪

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off-Kilter, while civil legal aid programs exist in every state in the US, funding barely provides one attorney for every 10,000 low-income Americans. And that figure doesn’t even include the tens of millions of Americans who struggle to pay for legal help because they don’t qualify for free federal legal assistance. Complex courtroom procedures and underfunded civil courts make it almost impossible for the average person to go it alone, especially given all the advantages that wealthy landlords, financial institutions, and other powerful players have when they lawyer up, which they usually do. We shine a light this week on America’s civil justice crisis, which results in low-income people losing their homes, their health care, and even their children simply because they can’t afford a lawyer.

But first, “in a time of crisis, we know that no one is coming to save us. We must forge a new society together. While the litany of challenges are, for the most part, self-evident — white supremacy, racial capitalism, neoliberalism, climate change, patriarchy, xenophobia, the assault on democracy, and more — our analysis isn’t always aligned, nor are our strategies and methods for making change. This is okay because in a complex society such as ours, heterogeneity is a good thing. At the same time, we’ve come together because we know that we aren’t building and exercising the power to make durable, transformational change.” These are the opening words of a post by the Center for Popular Democracy’s Brian Kettenring, welcoming readers to The Forge, a new journal by and for organizers that launched last month. I sat down with Brian and two of his fellow organizers behind The Forge, Ericka Taylor and Holly Craig-Wehrle, to learn more about this exciting new project and the story behind its launch. Let’s take a listen.

Brian, Ericka, Holly, thanks so much for taking the time to come on Off-Kilter.

BRIAN KETTENRING: Thanks.

ERICKA TAYLOR: Yeah. Thanks for having us.

HOLLY CRAIG-WEHRLE: Thanks.

KETTENRING: Glad to be here.

VALLAS: So, Brian, I want to start with you just to sort of help tell the story behind The Forge. How did this journal for and by organizers come into being?

KETTENRING: You know, when you think about the organizing world in the United States, there’s really not that many places, there’s a lot of really excellent progressive publications, for example, The Nation, Jacobin, Colorlines, The American Prospect. You could go on and on. But for those of us that work in organizing, there’s not actually that many places that are dedicated to thinking about how do we do this work better, how do we share our ideas, how do we up our game both individually and collectively? And we’re in probably the most sort of pivotal moment, certainly of my lifetime I think, in terms of what direction our society goes in. And I’ll speak frankly. I’m curious what others think, but I don’t think that we have risen fully to the task. In order to do that, I think we need sharper analysis. We need to up our collective game. And so, The Forge is intended to be a space where we can share some of those ideas and try to rise to the moment that’s before us.

VALLAS: Now, I read a little bit in my intro from this post that you wrote that it’s sort of the welcome post on The Forge site.

KETTENRING: Yep.

VALLAS: And your post enumerates some really specific, really concrete goals for what you’re trying to do with The Forge. Talk a little bit about the goals for this project. What gaps is it trying to fill?

KETTENRING: Yep. I mean there’s three main goals, and I’ll say a little bit about them. But number one is to help organizers strengthen their what we’re calling strategic practice to be better at the development and practice of strategy. Two is to create a space of sharing both knowledge, history, experience, lessons learned between organizers. And then third is to initiate dialogue between the organizing sectors and other sectors. So, for example, with academics, with journalists, with the broader progressive movement that doesn’t sort of inhabit the organizing world.

So, on the first, some of that comes from, at least for me, thinking about my own training as an organizer. I’m telling folks this is my 25th year as an organizer, having my organizer mid-life crisis. Some people go buy a convertible, and I helped start a journal. You know, go figure. But when I look back on those 25 years, I think I was trained, my early years, I was trained really well on methodology: like how to go knock on a door, how to organize a community meeting, how to organize a march or even a campaign. And I will say I was trained in the mid-’90s in Chicago, during the height of the Daley, the second, Daley Jr.’s sort of political machine. And so, that was the political question. So, I would even say I was trained reasonably well on strategy in that very particular context. But when I reflect on my own development as an organizer and having interviewed a bunch of folks for this project, none of us are really, there’s no rigorous curriculum to help people be more strategic in their work, let alone well, what if you aren’t working in the context of the Daley machine? How do you learn how other people practice strategy? And anyway, so that’s sort of the notion there is that we could all reflect and learn better on how we do our work and how we win change faster.

You know, the sharing piece is sort of obvious, but there’s not actually that many places to do it. And writing is one way to do it. There’s lots of other ways to share. In some ways, organizing is a very oral tradition, as well it should be because it’s a lot about relationships and listening. And so, the art of listening to people is so fundamental in our practice. But there is some benefit to writing. And also, we want to really make The Forge multimedia. So, we’re just getting going, but I think you’ll see us trying to experiment with video and other methods of sharing lessons, history, thoughts, strategies.

And then finally, dialogue with other sectors. I’ll use academics as an example. But there’s a lot of interesting research going on in a range of questions, and I think organizers would benefit from learning from some of that. And I think that a lot of folks in academia should understand better sort of what we’re doing and what’s going on. Or there’s a sort of another dynamic is we’re trying to help position organizers as strategists in the eyes of other folks. So, this is something we see here a lot in D.C. where it’s sort of like the metaphorical smoke-filled room where a bunch of people get together and set a strategy. And then they call some organizers in and say, “Can you go get the people behind that?” And that doesn’t really work because, if nothing else, organizing is about engaging the most affected constituencies in devising the strategies for their own freedom and advancement. And so, it’s an attempt to break that paradigm down a little bit.

VALLAS: Ericka, I want to bring you in next. And I want to ask you what may sound like something of a silly and really basic question, but I think it’s actually worth asking in the context of this conversation. And that’s, what is organizing? It’s a term people might think that they know the meaning of, but there’s a lot more there than might meet the eye.

TAYLOR: Absolutely. And I think that Brian hit on one of the most critical details a moment ago, which is organizing is about bringing the most affected population to bear on driving the change that affects their lives, right? So, and I think it’s broader than OK, well, this is a housing issue, and we want to sort of win affordable housing. So, we’ll bring together tenants who want to win. And that’s right. But it’s also about building power of that population, right? So, developing leadership. And for me, that’s how you distinguish mobilizing, one way you distinguish mobilizing from organizing. Getting a bunch of people together to sort of go at a target, sort of the bad person is important, but organizing is, again, about bringing those people together, developing their skills, and running campaigns, running campaigns that are going to bring meaningful changes in their lives while helping them develop into stronger and stronger sort of controllers of their own destiny.

VALLAS: And Holly, I want to bring you in with the same question, and I want to add a little bit of a spin to it, which is that organizing is something that comes in a lot of different flavors and has a lot of different sectors within it. Perhaps the sphere that people might be most familiar with is labor organizing. Talk a little bit about your take on kind of what is organizing and its role right now in particular?

CRAIG-WEHRLE: Yes. You know, I come from the labor background. I work with the union UC American Federation of Teachers. And what’s great about The Forge in a way is that organizing is organizing across the board in whatever industry it is. And so, for labor, it’s pretty much what Ericka said. I wish I had more to add to it. You know, it’s really about bringing people together and having them develop for themselves the strategy and goals that they need to effect the change that they want. And so, for labor that tends to be based around the workplace, although not always. And at this particular moment, I think we’re seeing challenges being brought about from a lot of different sources, right? And it’s affecting people in every place in their lives. It’s happening in the workplace. It happens at home. It happens out on the street for people. It happens in hospitals and doctors’ offices. And so, I think The Forge is able to kind of bring all of those things together and help us all to become better organizers and better strategists.

VALLAS: And staying with you for a moment, Holly in particular, because of your background as a labor organizer, one of the posts that The Forge has run focuses on the history of organizing. And it actually reads, “that it’s more important than ever to understand that history, given the inability of contemporary unions to increase or even maintain their membership.” What do you think it’s important for people to know about that history, to really understand the role of organizing in this current moment?

CRAIG-WEHRLE: I think that the…challenge with the…. Honestly, [chuckles] I’m one of the people that this is directed at. Let me start there. I am a relatively new person in organizing, and I think what we’re seeing is exactly what you’ve said. There’s not, our resources have dwindled. We need more information. We need more education and training. And what we all need to understand about the history is that so much of what we’re doing has actually been tried before. What I see repeatedly in my field is kind of just the remaking of the wheel all the time. And if we’re able to kind of look back and bring those voices from history forward, I think we can skip a lot of the difficulties and turmoil in building our movements.

VALLAS: So, Brian talked a little bit about the story behind The Forge. And given that I’ve got you guys with me, and you’re three of the people who are sort of the team behind this new initiative, would love to hear a little bit more about how each of you came to this project and how each of you, and your other colleagues who are involved with it, are putting your backgrounds as organizers to work in this journalistic context. And I’ll go over to you first, Ericka.

TAYLOR: Sure. You know, it was a very easy recruitment process for me.

KETTENRING: [laughs]

TAYLOR: I was —

VALLAS: Brian’s laughing. [laughs]

TAYLOR: Yes. At the time that I came into The Forge, I was working for D.C. Working Families Party, which shares office space with Center for Popular Democracy. So, Brain was literally an office mate and neighbor. And he and I first met 25 years ago and had not actually done any projects together. We’ve sort of been in the same orbits but not on the same campaigns. And he also knew that I happen to also be a writer, and I’ve spent a lot of time doing that. So, he said, “Hey, I’ve got this project going on. And how does it feel to you?” And remembering my early years as an organizer and how Brian had very strong methodological training, but our sort of strategy conversations were after the formal trainings and then now we’re playing pool and drinking beers and thinking, so how does this apply in your context? What are you seeing here? What are any lessons you can give me? And so, it was great to have that informal space, but very rarely have I had an opportunity to sort of, for that to be the practice of organizing, to be a sort of more broadly and strategically what I’ve been engaged in. So, hearing about The Forge project was really exciting, and especially the component of bringing in other sectors like academia and other folks whose work intersects with organizing but with whom we don’t always strategize together. So, the recruitment was easy, and the vision was super compelling. So, I was very happy to ho onboard.

VALLAS: Same question over to you, Holly.

CRAIG-WEHRLE: Yeah, I came by The Forge through, I think, a Twitter post asking people about their interest in a journal for organizers and responded enthusiastically, I think, with some ideas about things I would like to see and pitches for things that I would love to have written or help in writing. And connected with Brian and just sort of tried to jump in and help and be part of this wherever I can. I think it’s been really eye-opening for me. I came to this wanting to learn more. I felt the lack of knowledge, especially around strategy. I practiced and trained like everybody else with methodology, but strategy, you know, sometimes something that’s just decided on by other people. And sometimes it’s something that I just don’t have enough information about to be a good contributor in my own union. And so, being able to kind of just connect with the people creating The Forge has been really interesting, and I feel like I’ve already learned a lot. And I get to kind of put forward a little bit of my questions and interests and hope that what The Forge produces is something that people like me can really find useful.

VALLAS: And Brian, same question to you.

KETTENRING: Can I comment on one thing Holly said there?

VALLAS: Of course.

KETTENRING: Like it draws out one of the things we talked about in terms of the goals, the notion that she had felt — and I did in my sort of development as an organizer — that often in essence, what we’re trying to do is democratize who’s a strategist, right? And I think some of that is about generational dynamics within social movement organizations, be it a labor union or community organization or whatever. Some of it is about race and gender and class within our movements. And some of it is just about access to information and sharing. But I think that’s one of the overriding precepts,, I think of how I’m thinking about what we’re trying to do here, is help more people be empowered by becoming strategists in a new way and at a new level.

For me, I had actually written a memo to my colleagues at CPD a couple years ago saying, hey, we should do this. And I had 10, 15 years ago written book reviews for some other journals for organizers and things like that. But it’s sort of been an itch that’s needed scratching for me for a few years now. But there was a moment last year where an adviser to our leadership basically challenged us and said, “What are you guys going to do, each of you, to contribute to this strategic moment, not the next six months, but the next, say, five years?” And for me, this was one of my answers to that question is like, can I get together with some other organizers like Ericka and Holly and a bunch of others, and can we build something that speaks to a crucial need in our field? I think a lot about what the organizing sector — You know, I’m in the community organizing world separately. And one of the things that’s fun about this is there’s multiple subsectors, but I think a lot about what are the needs of our sector to advance? And I’m hoping that this will help sort of fulfill some of those needs.

VALLAS: And sticking with you for a second, Brian, the sort of tagline for the journal is that it’s a journal by and for — or is it for and by organizers.

KETTENRING: Yeah, by and for. Yeah.

VALLAS: By and for organizers. But who is the audience? Is it just organizers, or is it broader than that?

KETTENRING: Well, I think no, it’s not just organizers. It’s sort of organizers and anybody, and their friends, you know.

VALLAS: [laughs]

KETTENRING: So, here’s one way to think about it. One is nobody knows how many organizers there are in America. So, that’s sort of an interesting question. So, I put a Facebook post up four or five months ago before we did this and asked, “How many organizers are there in America?” And what it led to was a vigorous, some might say, vicious debate about what’s an organizer and ho counts, right? So, one thing that —

VALLAS: Do you have a view on that?

KETTENRING: I’ve been saying 20,000, but I don’t really know. I actually think it’s one thing we should cause to happen is not pay for it, but commission some academics to try to actually arrive at a good definition and actually figure out some sort of sense. Because I think would be useful to know. Like. But so, there are boundary questions like, well, what’s your definition of an organizer? So, one thing we’re saying is there’s five types of organizers that we want to speak to: community organizers, movement organizers, labor, digital, and progressive electoral. And that actually has some interesting questions around it. Well, what about issue organizers? You know, and there’s some others like that. There’s also a question of, well, what about volunteer organizers rather than paid professional organizers? So, there’s a whole conversation to be had about the pros and cons about the professionalization of the field. I do think that one thing that does unite people, irrespective of that question, is to see organizing is a, there is there’s some art and some science. And so, we often say there is a craft to it that can be learned and improved upon whether you’re a paid organizer or a volunteer. And I hope that we’ll explore these questions in the coming years and also sort of develop content that’s relevant to volunteer organizers, not just paid organizers, so yeah.

VALLAS: So, Ericka and Holly, you guys are both on the publishing committee for The Forge. And so, as part of that, you’re deeply involved in selecting the content and some of the voices for it. Who’s been writing for it, who’s been contributing, and what are some of the examples of the types of issues that it’s been covering? And I’ll start with you, Ericka.

TAYLOR: Well, I have to say that one of the most exciting pieces of the initial launch issue was having a wide array of women talking about the Supreme Court justice, Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, the whole process: what his nomination meant and what the struggle against it and how they struggle against it looked. So, having one issue that we had, we could look at it from multiple perspectives, I think, was a really valuable piece. And I also think that broadening beyond just the sort of what’s happening in the world, but also looking at resources or the book reviews, I think will be really useful. And I can imagine someday — we haven’t talked about this — but sort of movie reviews or yeah, documentaries that are coming out or are old, just an engaging with culture and organizing and seeing how it plays out. And seeing what can be elevated, ways to sort of spread the gospel, for lack of a better term.

VALLAS: I feel like I’m watching pitches happen actively between the publishing committee and the editor, right?

TAYLOR: [laughs]

KETTENRING: Yeah!

VALLAS: You heard it here first! Movie reviews coming. And sort of staying with that question, I found it notable — and staying with you for a second, Ericka — I found it notable that the launch edition did focus so heavily on the Kavanaugh fight. And so, I’m really, I’m curious to hear what went into picking that for the launch when a lot of us probably consider that moment among the most demoralizing as progressives and one that some people have labeled a failure, obviously, because as you noted in your answer just a moment ago, he is now Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh, which we obviously hoped would never come to be.

TAYLOR: Right. Well, I think that the beauty of the demoralizing moments and the losses that we suffer is that I think they can galvanize people. And I think that Kavanaugh has actually done a good bit of that. So, sort of realizing, OK, we need to be strong, and we need to figure out sort of who the opposition is, how it’s coming against us, and how we bring ourselves together to fight. I think it gives us, it keeps us on our toes, which is I mean, I think we’re always on our toes, frankly. But — [laughs]

VALLAS: [laughs] This whole interview actually is being recorded with you guys on your toes. Our listeners can’t see that, right?

TAYLOR: Yeah, yeah. [laughs]

Can we stand down, now? My feet are killing me.

ALL: [laugh]

VALLAS: And Holly, I noticed in looking through some of the content on the site so far, you’re actually involved with a lot of the pieces that are the Organizer Voices interviews, really kind of giving voice directly to some of the organizers across the country who might not otherwise be quoted in news outlets or be visible on the issues that they’re working on day in and day out. What are some of your favorite pieces so far that you’ve been involved with?

CRAIG-WEHRLE: Yeah. The Organizer Voices came out of a desire to have a Studs Terkel-esque look at organizing, where people could really speak just at length about what it is they do. And so, I had the great opportunity to talk with to Puja Datta and Angela Lang, who have both been organizing for nearly a decade, about as long as I have actually, in a variety of ways. And I got to really hear from them not just what they see as organizing, what they get to view for their work. And kind of the way organizers speak about their work is mostly to put all of the emphasis and information on what the people they’re working with are doing. You uplift, in unions, you uplift the members, the workers, right? And so, these conversations were about kind of re-centering that back on the organizer themselves and what skills and things that they’ve built upon do they bring to this as a craft, as a passion, and seeing organizing as a skill and kind of reminding us that the work that we do is critical, and this is a space where we can talk about that.

VALLAS: Oh, go ahead. Sure, Ericka.

TAYLOR: Yeah, I have one thing I’d like to add on that to sort of elevate from what Holly was saying, that with Puja and Angela both, one thing that really was moving for me was that — and I know Puja from other contexts — but seeing the honesty about the challenges, right? I know that after Obama was elected, when he was running, it was like, we’re all organizers. And it seemed very glamorous and exciting and —

VALLAS: Community organizer in the White House.

TAYLOR: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But this is not an easy gig. And I really appreciate, again, popular press, because I know Puja, sort of looking at the challenges and the frustrations and looking at Forge. The Forge also is a place where we can sort of get that reinforcement and support, knowing that we’re not alone in this. And that the challenges are shared and that we can come together to develop strategies to sort of move forward despite the opposition and the things that weight us down.

VALLAS: So, you guys are a month in. You’re celebrating, I think your month-iversery. Congratulations.

KETTENRING: Yeah!

ALL: [laugh]

VALLAS: Congratulations. You’ve made it this far. So, I’m curious to hear you guys reflect a little bit on kind of what you’ve learned so far a month in, what’s inspiring you so far, what the challenges are, and maybe a little bit of what’s surprised you that you didn’t see coming. And Brian, I’ll start with you.

KETTENRING: A few things. I didn’t answer your question earlier about audience fully. But one thing that I found is there’s a bigger audience than maybe we suspected. And my sample size is small, so it’s not statistically valid. But I’ve been managing the Twitter account and just sort of watching the, as we are growing. We crossed 1,000 in a few days, which was kind of cool and so on. But what I’m finding is a, is some of the content that people contributed was really well done and really exciting and interesting and spoke. And I think in the resistance moment, I think it brought the audiences bigger. So, I had said at the beginning, I think 20,000 organizers in America and maybe an audience of another 50 or 100,000 beyond that. My sort of instinct a month in is that sort of secondary audience is bigger potentially. Because there’s millions of people who want to make change and sort of want to understand or would find interesting the sort of thinking about how you actually make change in the world. So, I think that’ll present an interesting challenge for us as a little enterprise, because we’re sort of part professional journal for organizers and yet we want to serve both people who do the work and people who are sort of connected to the work but aren’t doing it every day. So, how do you speak to dual audiences I think will be an interesting theme that we’ll be wrestling with in the months and years ahead.

VALLAS: Same set of questions to you, Holly.

CRAIG-WEHRLE: Yeah, I think what, well, let’s start with what’s inspired me, which is just discovering how much organizers are valuing and are interested in building out this journal. You know, I’ve spoken to a lot of people in the publishing committee. We’ve gotten to know each other somewhat well. We’ve had a very busy month. And everybody is working jobs that are more than full-time, absolutely. And yet there is such a passion around finding time to really dedicate to The Forge and having conversations about the themes that we should look at and material we should solicit, but also people who are really interested in just being a presence as an editor, right, so that they can make sure that the content is clear and focused. I just I spend so much of my time asking people to help with things that they know they should do but don’t really want to do or want to turn down. And “no” is the most frequent answer to anything that I ask, and that’s just not been the case here. And that’s been really, really inspiring.

VALLAS: And same — Oh, go ahead. No, I didn’t mean to interrupt you.

CRAIG-WEHRLE: Oh, no. I was just in terms of challenges, I think none of us have a lot of experience with putting together a website like this and then a journal like this. And so, I think that’s been really eye-opening in a different way to discover all of the work that goes into it.

VALLAS: Amen. And Ericka, same set of questions to you and any reflections at this point, a month in.

TAYLOR: Yeah. What Holly and Brian said really resonated with me. And I find myself with this project, this sort of small and mighty team, trying to rein in the ambition. Like it’s not to rein in the ambition.

KETTENRING: [chuckles]

TAYLOR: There’s so much that we can do and that we want to do. And just sort of needing the capacity to make it happen. But I’ve been really impressed with how the team’s come together and how we’ve each sort of found our little corners to carve out. The grammar nerd in me so excited about like, oh, oh! We’re gonna make serial commas the standard. And we’re going to —

KETTENRING: [laughs]

VALLAS: So noted. You’re writing the style guide. Got it.

TAYLOR: Exactly! Sort of like making sure we have parallelism with all the verbs. And so, it’s been fun to say to people like, “Well, I really dig this aspect of the work.” And I think it’s sort of been a coming together very organically, I think. But I do want really, I think one of the challenges is just sort of being able to grow with what you want to do and expand the team so that we can move forward with as much power as we can.

VALLAS: Brian, what’s next for The Forge? You guys maybe can give us a little bit of a sneak peek on what’s coming.

KETTENRING: Yeah, a few things. I mean one is when we set out to do this, at least for me, I thought of it as a publication, but quickly came to realize in the digital age and especially with dealing with organizers of all people, you really are building a community. And so, I think we have work to do to build that out, the sort of interactive spaces for organizers and so on. So, I think that’ll be one direction. I think there’s a second one. In some ways, one message I would want to deliver is like we’re going to need to be responsive to the needs of organizers, right? So, I think one thing that we definitely have heard some call for is more resources like materials and things. This goes to Holly’s point about let’s not reinvent the wheel for the 23rd time. And one of the fun things is there are often materials across subsectors in organizing. So, I think that’s something we need to confront.

In terms of just things we’re going to be writing about or exploring, there’s sort of a million possibilities. The next issue, November-Decemberish is going to be about the future of organizing. So, we’re inviting between 10 and 12 leading organizers from different types of organizing to each speak to this is what I see as the future of our field or our subfield. And I think they’ll come from different vantage points and make for a really interesting dialogue. And into 2020, we don’t have a regular set publishing schedule. The first Tuesday the month, but we’re going to do between 10 to 20 sort of groups series sort of Netflix style. So, we’ll probably do, we got to do something around the 2020 elections, of course. But we’ll also do one on leverage in organizing: the concept of how do you build leverage, and how do you use it to move a target? Well, we’re going to do one on membership and different membership recruitment strategies. We’ll probably touch on all the sort of core issues in the coming period about organizer development and training around leadership development, but also more vision and sort of big picture questions: racial capitalism, what is it, and how does that affect the work that we all do? Or looking ahead, I’d like to do one around movement scenario planning for the 2020s. We know that there’s going to be an election in 2020, and then we know there’s going to be redistricting. Let’s start to think ahead now and how that affects us as organizers strategically going into the next decade. So, anyway, we have lots of possibilities, the publishing committee, and we need to sort of work through all of it. But those are just a few ideas.

VALLAS: Well, pitching you now, I would love to have the folks contributing to those different series on this show because those are all conversations that I know our listeners would love to be part of.

KETTENRING: Awesome. We’d love to.

VALLAS: So, Ericka and Holly, you guys are going to get the last word. I think the question a lot of folks might be thinking as they’re hearing all of this is, how do I get involved with this? I’ve got stuff to say. I’m out there organizing in my community. I’m doing this work. What’s the answer? How do people get engaged? Ericka, you first.

TAYLOR: Just contact us, you know, tweet, Facebook.

VALLAS: That’s right. That’s how Holly got involved, right?

TAYLOR: Exactly. So, email us. We’re pretty accessible. And Brian’s been doing the lion’s share of, actually, on the entirety, I think, of monitoring the social media pieces. And tell your friends. Tell your friends. But yeah, I think folks, whatever vehicle that folks want to use to contact us, I think is we’re more than welcoming of.

VALLAS: Great. And Holly, remind us of the website people can read The Forge at.

CRAIG-WEHRLE: It’s ForgeOrganizing.org.

VALLAS: Great. And there’s info right on the page about how folks can contact you. So, now you’ve heard it from the publishing committee: they are looking for your contributions. So, that is your call, listeners. I’ve been speaking with Brian Kettenring, Ericka Taylor, and Holly Craig-Wehrle, all part of the team behind The Forge, the Journal by and for organizers. I really appreciate you guys taking the time. This is such a cool initiative, and I am just so, so excited to see where it goes.

KETTENRING: Thank you so much.

TAYLOR: Thanks for having us.

CRAIG-WEHRLE: Thank you.

VALLAS: Don’t go away. More Off-Kilter after the break. I’m Rebecca Vallas. [hip hop music break]

You’re listening to Off-Kilter. I’m Rebecca Vallas. We’re all well aware of how broken America’s criminal justice system is, but far less often discussed is the civil justice crisis that we’re facing as a nation as well, which results in low-income people losing their homes, their healthcare, and even their children simply because they can’t afford a lawyer. I talk with Karen Lash and Maha Jweied, two former Obama administration officials, who helped to run the administration’s Office of Access to Justice, about this civil justice crisis as they call it and what it will take to make the system work for everyone, not just those of us who can afford private lawyers. Let’s take a listen.

With me to discuss are two senior fellows at the Center for American Progress, Karen Lash and Maha Jweied. They are also former Obama administration officials who worked on Access to Justice, and they’re the authors of this report. Karen and Maha, thanks so much for taking the time to join the show.

MAHA JWEIED: Thank you.

KAREN LASH: Oh, Rebecca, thank you so much, and to Sam and your teams and to CAP for putting a spotlight on the civil justice issues.

VALLAS: Well, you know there are few things closer to my heart as a forever legal aid lawyer who may just not be in that current form these days. But Karen, starting with you, for years, we’ve all been aware of a major criminal justice crisis in this country. But you guys argue that we’re also facing a civil justice crisis, that’s receiving a lot less attention. What do you mean when you ring the alarm bells about a civil justice crisis?

LASH: Mmhmm. Well, there’s tens of millions of people in the United States that have some kind of civil justice problem each year. According to Dr. Rebecca Sandifer, who’s a leading researcher on this question, she says there’s a 100 million social justice problems annually. These are problems that involve keeping people’s homes, getting their healthcare that they’re entitled to, getting a revoked driver’s license reinstated so they can drive to work. It decides who gets to stay in the country, who gets relief from illegal debt collectors. So, these several legal needs are the same as basic human needs. So, unlike when you’re accused of a crime — which is unfortunately a flawed and underfunded system in the United States — but there is a constitutional right to a lawyer. But in most instances, there isn’t a right to counsel in civil matters. So, if you show up in court and you’re not a bank or a corporation or a wealthy individual, you probably don’t have a lawyer. 90 percent of tenants in eviction procedures don’t have a lawyer. 90 percent of landlords do. Three out of four civil cases, there’s one or both sides that show up without any legal help. And often, it’s because they can’t afford it.

Now, we do have a network of congressionally-funded legal aid programs administered by the Legal Services Corporation. Those 130+ local nonprofit legal aid organizations, they provide free legal help to low-income people. But LSC programs can only meet a fraction of the need, and they have to turn away about 50 percent of the people who show up because they just can’t handle the volume. And this administration keeps proposing to eliminate LSC, but fortunately, preserving that funding has turned into a real bipartisan effort.

VALLAS: And this was something that, I’d mentioned this was close to my heart. This was something I saw each and every day firsthand when I was a legal aid lawyer representing low-income people who couldn’t afford representation otherwise when my program, Community Legal Services, which is based in Philadelphia would turn people away who were struggling to navigate some kind of a problem like you’re describing and who, in many cases, had legal rights that were being violated, had a claim, had a case where there was merit to it. And so, we would be forced to turn them away without help, not because they didn’t have a case with merit, not because they were wrong, not because there was nothing wrong going on there, but simply because we didn’t have enough resources. We didn’t have enough lawyers to take their case. And I have to say, one of the things that was hardest about doing that work really was being in the seat — we called it intake — where you would sit there, and you would meet with people one after the other and hear about their legal problem, in many cases, like you were describing, life and death kinds of problems that people were facing. And then you would say to them, “Look, you do have a case here, but I can’t take it. And we’re going to have to hope that sending you away with some advice is going to help you because we just don’t have enough lawyers to take your case.” So, that’s really what you’re describing here is going on each and every day because of this civil justice crisis.

Maha, I want to bring you in here because a big part of what this report that I mentioned that you guys put out — that really, incredibly comprehensive and talks a lot about, summarizes all the research that Karen was just walking through and all those statistics — a big part of what your report does is to really put a face on this crisis by talking about some of the very real consequences that result. And on the flip side, it really sort of shines a light on how differently things can turn out when someone does have access to a lawyer, whether through civil legal aid or some other means. Talk a little bit about some of those different arenas where this plays out either for good or for bad.

JWEIED: Thank you, Rebecca. I also want to echo Karen’s thanks to CAP for really focusing and shining a light on this issue. It’s so often relegated to the backburner that it doesn’t have this amount of publicity surrounding it. And in our report, as you described, we really focus on five issues. But honestly, we could have picked another dozen or so. We highlighted those areas that had some really great examples in which federal leadership has made a difference. We talked about health, housing, barriers to employment, debt collection, immigration. But again, there’s far many more that could’ve been focused on. And really what’s fascinating about these issues and others is that the intersection between civil legal aid and the policy priorities that every level of government works on to address are often not seen or understood. And that’s true also with everyday problems that individuals across the US face.

Most people, including smart, committed policymakers, don’t know how civil legal aid interventions are often essential to addressing the problems. And what’s great is that there is a growing body of research that shows what that means and how it can make a difference. For example, some research now can detail things like wages and employment going up and recidivism going down when people with a criminal record get their record expunged or that health improves and healthcare costs can go down when people get legal help. And debt collection practices are more fair when people have lawyers. And in immigration, for individuals who are detained, they can obtain a successful outcome more often when they’re represented.

Picking one or two, I’ll talk about health initially. You know, really, people without insurance often don’t go to doctors. And that’s even more true for people of color or low-income where they are particularly likely to be un- or underinsured. But lawyers are essential because they can often help secure healthcare benefits and appeal erroneous denials for benefits. And that really is important for government programs to be functioning well and to ensure that private healthcare insurance is also following the law. One great example of the ways in which lawyers are advancing health relates to a form of legal services called the Medical Legal Partnership. It is where more and more medical professionals recognize that they need to prescribe actually a lawyer to ensure that someone is healthy. The National Center for Medical Legal Partnership at the George Washington University is really the leader in this area, and they’ve been helping across the country those legal aid programs that have collaborations with clinics and hospitals and practitioners who are ensuring that people are healthy by training and ensuring that doctors understand when patients come and present with, perhaps a child presents with asthma, that really what might be the problem is that the family lives in substandard housing. And that as much as you can prescribe an inhaler or medicine to try to account for the child’s health problem, really what they need is to remediate the mold or remediate the lead paint that might be in the house. So, having a lawyer write a strongly-worded letter to a landlord can often result in improving the health of the child by ensuring that the landlord, in fact, improves the housing that the family lives in.

Another area that is of really great importance across the country —

VALLAS: And I want to pause you right there just because, people are listening to this and they’re hearing you talk about the connection between lawyers and the civil justice system and health care. And so rarely in the conversation about healthcare and the fight for universal healthcare, do people really make that that extra step, right? So, a big part of what I’m hearing you say is it’s not enough to be fighting for people to have insurance coverage. It’s not enough for us to be fighting for people to have access to care. That there’s actually more needed because of many of the injustices that go on within our healthcare system. And that’s certainly something I remember seeing in spades in my legal aid days was a lot of my clients, they had health insurance. But they were being wrongfully denied medications they needed or coverage for some kind of treatment that had been sort of waved in their face as something that could help, but that they were not going to have meaningful access to because of profiteering within the healthcare system. So, a lot of ways that what you’re describing really should be part and parcel of the national conversation around health care.

JWEIED: Absolutely. And it’s also fascinating to consider those individuals who are eligible for government-funded programs like our veterans being able to access V.A. health clinics and medical facilities and being able to actually obtain benefits under their status of being veterans. And in fact, it’s really an important aspect of what civil justice means in this country and the provision of legal services that you could have lawyers help veterans who are erroneously denied their benefits and be able to actually obtain not just their health insurance, which in some instances is the problem, that they’re not even being able to obtain their V.A. benefits, but also to be able to obtain the medical care that they need.

LASH: And in our issue brief, we tell the story about a doctor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center who’s an oncologist. And in a segment on the PBS News Hour, she says she has seen attorneys help her patients time and again and claims, “I can’t practice medicine without medical-legal partnership.” And I think that really more and more medical professionals are getting on the train and understand that they can maybe solve an immediate, urgent medical need, but they can’t solve the health needs without that legal partnership.

VALLAS: Which goes, in so many cases, to the root causes of what ends up showing up as symptoms in the health context.

And Maha, you were going to go on next to talk about another area where this shows up, which is housing.

JWEIED: That’s right. You know, housing is a really, obviously, we all know we need safe and secure housing to have successful and healthy lives. And it’s been a real important focus of the civil justice community these days and a lot of activity across the country with respect to ensuring individuals have housing. Sociologist Matthew Desmond’s very famous and well-known Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted is just one example of the place in which there’s been more focus on this issue of late. And he and other researchers have documented that increased risk of homelessness borne by the 90 percent of tenants who navigate eviction proceedings without a lawyer.

VALLAS: I want to pause you there so people can take in that statistic, because I feel like there are a few stats that more concretely and sort of concisely sum up the nature of this civil justice crisis that you guys are talking about. 90 percent of tenants facing eviction don’t have a lawyer in that proceeding, even though their house is on the line.

JWEIED: That’s right. That’s right. And lawyers can help prevent wrongful evictions and all of the collateral consequences that flow. Studies out of Boston, Philadelphia, California, New York — and we’ve documented some of these in our report — have confirmed that is actually the case. And it’s not just about losing your housing, which we know is so important, but the collateral consequences that flow impacts individuals lives for years: bad credit, lost furnishing, children who have to be moved from school to school because they’re in fact, having to be moved around. So, really in this area, it’s remarkable the amount of need that still exists. And yet also very important to note that there’s a lot of activity out there around trying to support and enhance the provision of legal assistance to individuals with housing needs.

LASH: Maha’s great example also illustrates another important point, especially for government decision makers, which is that often, the legal intervention is the cost effective intervention. So, if you can prevent that illegal eviction from happening, you prevent a series of other, often more expensive, harms that results. That of course, most importantly to the family, but also to the local government, local, state, and federal government who are then needing to fund the various services. So, you stop those awful harms from cascading and just rolling downhill.

VALLAS: And again, similar to the point we were making about the connection to the healthcare conversation, which is so front and center in our current presidential primary debates, the affordable housing crisis is finally also having a moment where people are talking about it. People are talking about how unaffordable housing is in this country for not just people who are officially poor, but for huge swaths of the population as rents continue to rise. But it isn’t just an affordability issue, right? It’s also about — and this is the piece that sort of doesn’t get added into the conversation — helping people retain their housing when they’re finally able to get into it so that they don’t spiral into that crisis like you’re describing. And the famous quote from Matthew Desmond, who we had on the show a while back when his book Evicted came out, was that, “eviction is not just a consequence of poverty. It’s also a cause of poverty,” for all the reasons that you’re describing.

LASH: Right. And the research is so clear on this at this point that it’s practically policy malpractice to not include legal services in the mix of supportive services that people need to stay housed.

VALLAS: So, another area in your report that may be less sort of readily visible to people about kind of the areas in which not being able to have a lawyer might have real consequences is the employment arena. We talk a lot on this show about the barriers that many different marginalized populations can face to employment, whether that’s people with criminal records who are facing discrimination in the workforce, whether that’s people with disabilities, whether it’s just communities of color and the sheer gaps that we see between unemployment rates for whites and for workers of color. And you argue in this report that there are a number of reasons that access to civil lawyers actually can make a real difference in that context as well.

JWEIED: Absolutely. You know, people with criminal records have an unemployment rate of 27 percent. And these are individuals who’ve had problems anywhere from unpaid traffic tickets to time served for felonies. And it can be really part deep into the history of their lives or just really recent. So, regardless, the idea that having something on your record is treated almost equally in many places across the country, regardless of the severity and will not really account for the ability for someone to move on with their lives and be able to actually leave whatever situation that they’re trying to move away from and actually be able to be successful once again and reintegrate into society. And so, that’s why civil justice and civil legal aid is so very important: that these are the lawyers for whom individuals can go to, to seek expungement of their records and to allow for them to be able to actually be employable in a real way. And again, the research bears this out that on average, wages go up by more than 20 percent within one year of an individual being able to have their record expunged.

And our issue brief also details a important story of a woman named Francesca. Of course, we’ve changed her name. She was a 21-year-old single mother of two who received a job offer from a major bank’s call center, but that she lost the offer when they went through the background check and found a noncriminal offense that stemmed when she was 18 that she got for shoplifting $20 of clothing from a former employer. So, she knew it was a mistake, vowed not to do it again, paid the fine, and thought that all would be done with that. But regrettably not. She was then prohibited from being able to move on with her life and to be able to get this job that she needed to support her family.

VALLAS: And all because of really a crime of survival, right?

JWEIED: That’s right.

VALLAS: That’s what you’re describing. It’s not super different from the stories that we often and tragically hear about someone stealing a sandwich. Or I mean, it’s practically out of Les Mis.

JWEIED: That’s exactly right. And in fact, you know, it was a municipal ticket. So, there’s also this idea that it really doesn’t matter where the penalty comes from, that once you’re part of the system, you really are then subject to all of its perils. We included it — and this might be a nice way to also transition to some of our discussions around what we know the federal government can do — we included it up because there was a US Department of Labor program that funded a grantee, that helped Francesca be referred to a legal aid partner. It’s Legal Action of Wisconsin. And within a month, that legal aid attorney got Francesca’s ticket re-opened and dismissed. And from there, she was able to actually get hired.

So, our focus and our activities, it’s important to make the connection between legal need in this country for individuals and acknowledge that people with limited means actually have a more difficult time with resolving their legal problems. All of us have had legal problems, but our ability to navigate the system based often on our socioeconomic status, our race, so many factors, can enable us to be able to navigate more swiftly and more effectively. But that really, when it comes down to it, there are so many ways in which not only can lawyers and non-lawyer interventions help, but that the federal government actually has an important part to play in this work by supporting programs that can rightly understand and acknowledge the role that civil legal aid can have in supporting individuals and the priorities of our government.

VALLAS: So, let’s talk about that. Because I mentioned in introducing you guys that not only are you now serving as senior fellows at the Center for American Progress, where I also work, but you both worked in the Obama administration — and Maha, you actually in several administrations — on issues related to access to justice and civil legal aid. And you were both involved with the formation of something called the Office for Access to Justice during the Obama years. Maha, tell a little bit of the story of how the office came into being and how it was part of the Obama administration’s efforts to address this civil justice crisis that we’re talking about.

JWEIED: Thanks, Rebecca. Yeah. In fact, I was there through the closure of the office, I shouldn’t start at the end, which was under this administration. But all to say, it was started in 2010 by Attorney General Holder. First, it was an initiative. It grew to be its own office. And it worked to address — it’s a very lofty, high mission — to address the access to justice crisis in the criminal and civil justice systems. Regrettably, it was closed in 2018 under Attorney General Sessions with the functions of the office transferred to the Office of Legal Policy within the department. So, the mission was quite broad, and we worked within the department and we worked with other federal agencies. We worked with state, local, and tribal justice system stakeholders. And the idea was to work to find ways to increase access to counsel and legal assistance and generally improve the justice delivery systems that serve people who are unable to afford lawyers. And it wasn’t, again, simply about getting lawyers. It was about trying to create efficiencies in the justice system so that, in fact, people could resolve their legal problems. And that might mean you need a lawyer, but it also might mean you need some help. And you might need to have some resources, perhaps online or otherwise, to be able to understand what your problems are.

And the big thrust behind the office is that the federal government is so big, and most career and political appointees really often work in silos. And so, what was unique about us was that we were there to focus on access to justice, an issue that most folks were very friendly towards and felt like it was an important topic or issue to work on, but that there really was no one carrying the water on that. And for that reason, it wasn’t really a focus or at the center of conversations across government. So, we were really the only place in the federal government focusing on this work. And we were a policy office. And that meant we didn’t have some of the tools that many other components of the Department of Justice or really other agencies have, which means we had no grant making authority. We had no law enforcement authority. But really, that allowed us to be creative and opportunistic and allowed us to find a lot of opportunities with champions in other parts of government.

And so, I’ll also share that we served as the central authority of the U.S. government on access to justice, which meant that we were also called upon to serve as the US experts on access to justice in international settings, where it has also grown to be a really important focus of activity to end poverty globally. One of our most successful strategies was using our convening authority, and that was to help other parts of the executive branch move around the issues of civil justice, and in part to make government more effective. And I’ll turn to Karen, who can share more about some of that really important work.

LASH: So, as Maha said, everybody understands that ensuring justice for all, including people who can’t afford legal help, is just important to fully functioning government and to our democracy. But we also learned while we were there that not everyone knows that it’s also essential to ensuring we have the most effective government programs possible. So, our big idea was kind of simple. We launched something called the Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable, better known as LAIR. In the federal government, you have to have an acronym. We were fortunate to have vowels.

ALL: [laugh]

LASH: But the big idea animating it was pretty simple: that there were many government programs, policies, and initiatives that are aimed at increasing opportunities for getting an education, employment, housing, healthcare, and improving family stability and public safety that are just more effective. They’re more efficient and fair when they include legal aid alongside the other supportive services a government program is already providing. So, for many government programs seeking to help people with a particular kind of problem, legal aid is an essential part of an effective response. So, thanks to the leadership of Tonya Robinson, who was at the White House Domestic Policy Council, and then Associate Attorney General Tony West, we launched LAIR. We grew to having 22 federal agencies who all are representatives. They all took inventory. They lined up that evidence base we keep referring to, all that research that showed we’re going to get better outcomes in those programs when legal help is included. And they looked at the myriad government programs to see which gave them authority to include legal aid. And we discovered lots of programs didn’t include legal aid, but they could. And they had statutory authority to allow it and that they should. Because more people would get the results we seek out of those government programs: more people with a criminal record would get a job, more domestic violence survivors will escape, more seniors will be free from financial exploitation, more immigrant children fleeing violence and abuse will find refuge. And we could keep going on that list.

And we were super proud in 2015 to get the attention of the president, who elevated LAIR to a White House initiative. And he did that on the eve of the U.N. Sustainable Development Summit, making that international link. So, the work is about access to justice, yes. But it’s also just smart, effective, evidence-ed government.

VALLAS: And staying with you for a moment, Karen, one of the things that we have been watching over the years, and particularly in actually recent months, while we have watched this vacuum develop at the federal level when it comes to addressing the civil justice crisis, is states and cities really stepping into the breach by starting to adopt right to counsel policies in certain limited civil contexts. Talk a little bit about some of what we’ve been seeing at the state and local level. And do you find optimism there?

LASH: I do.

VALLAS: Is that part of the strategy here?

LASH: Absolutely. So, thanks to American University’s Justice Programs Office who gave me a home when my funders, Open Society Foundations and Kresge and Public Welfare, they funded me to pretty much continue this work. So, I launched this Justice In Government Project where we’re adapting these LAIR-like strategies for states because they also have executive branch agencies that are similarly working to solve all those same kinds of problems that people have, and often with federal funds that allow the states to spend some of those funds on legal services. So, in that work, I also gave a shout out to a chance to work closely with the National Legal Aid & Defender Association, who has similarly been working to make civil legal services better partners to all levels of government. And really, those city and state governments have for quite a while been helping to plug that gap that we talked about at the beginning. Some states, they do it more or less effectively, depending on which state. And for anybody interested in seeing where their state lands, you can check out the Justice Index at the National Center for Access to Justice.

VALLAS: And we’ll have a link to that on our nerdy syllabus page of course.

LASH: All right. Great, great. But as you say, on the right to counsel movement, there’s been a lot of exciting activity and a real growth in that movement for, in particular, for a civil right to counsel for tenants facing eviction. So, we’ve got New York City, New Jersey, and San Francisco: they’ve recently established a right to counsel for tenants. D.C. is kind of close. It’s not exactly a right, but they also made a big statement. There’s similar legislation that’s been introduced in Massachusetts, Detroit, Cleveland, Connecticut, Los Angeles, Philadelphia. Other jurisdictions are not far behind. And actually another link for anybody super interested in that movement is the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel. They do a great job of tracking all of that activity.

VALLAS: And we’ll have a link to that available as well.

Maha, in the last two minutes that we have, I’m going to throw kind of one last big question at you, which is, I mentioned here we are in the context of obviously the presidential primary season. We are starting to see some members or some sort of denizens of the debate stage actually start to talk about and contemplate the civil justice crisis as part of their platforms. What would you want to see from the next administration? And does it involve reinstating the federal bodies you talked about? Does it involve a right to counsel at the federal level?

JWEIED: It’s great questions. And really, we are so heartened to see that it’s starting to become more of a focus of the presidential primary season and really encourage it. [chuckles] And, you know, it goes without saying that Karen and I are very committed to continuing to develop more of this work that CAP has so generously afforded us by allowing us to work on this report with you and with Sam and others here and to really consider the ways in which we might develop an agenda on this issue for a future administration. Certainly, we can confirm one of our top recommendations would be to reinstate the Office for Access to Justice. And ditto on LAIR on the Interagency Roundtable that Karen described, which we should note still does exist, and in fact, in the first year of the Trump administration, had three meetings, and since the closure of the office, has had one earlier this year, actually. But we know more can be done collectively across executive branch to advance civil justice and that the absence of an office dedicated to these issues has created a void. And really, we were the only office focusing on legal services for the poor in the executive branch, and its absence has created a lack of focus, and in some cases, hostility on these issues by the current administration. Karen?

LASH: Yeah. And we’re excited about the right to counsel movement with the caveat, I suppose, that we really hope these movements, this movement is married to some of the other innovations that are developing in the states that are using less lawyer-intensive approaches, new tiers of legal navigators to help people, self-help, assisted self-help strategies, technology innovations. You know, all of that is happening in the state laboratories, and we’re really excited about how those all can work together in an ecosystem to tackle really what’s just an enormous, enormous gap in this country. It’s shameful that, in the richest country in the history of the world, that people can lose their homes, their livelihoods, their kids, because they just didn’t get the legal help they needed to enforce their rights.

VALLAS: And I want to close with some really powerful words from your report. “The status quo continues to produce too many unfair trials, distrust in the justice system, and anti-poverty government programs that don’t achieve the outcomes that they should or could. The current ratio of one legal aid lawyer for 10,000 low-income people is fundamentally unacceptable for the rule of law and dangerously undermines US democracy.”

I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to come on the show and for the work that you’ve done to really lay out this report and make the case for federal leadership that we’re not seeing in addressing this civil justice crisis. I’ve been speaking with Karen Lash and Maha Jweied. They are senior fellows at the Center for American Progress and former officials in the Obama administration working in the Office of Access to Justice. Thanks to you both for taking the time.

JWEIED: Thank you, Rebecca.

LASH: Thank you, Rebecca.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced by Will Urquhart and David Ballard. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @OffKilterShow, and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the We Act Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.

♪ I want freedom (freedom)

Freedom (freedom)

Now, I don’t know where it’s at

But it’s calling me back

I feel my spirit is revealing,

And now we just trynta get freedom (freedom)

What we talkin’ bout…. ♪