Report Provides the Big Picture in Illinois

by Zena Naiditch

Equip for Equality's President and CEO Zena Naiditch As this state's federally mandated Protection and Advocacy System, Equip for Equality holds unique privileges and responsibilities for promoting disability rights in Illinois. Congress has provided us with truly effective tools for assisting people with disabilities, but limited resources frequently compel us to seek practical compromises among the services we would ideally provide. We often struggle with how much service to provide directly to individuals and how much to dedicate to large systemic issues, and, as the only organization dedicated to providing legal advocacy for all people with disabilities throughout the state, we try to make choices that reflect the breadth of disability-rights needs in this highly diverse population. It is also important for us to consider whether our activities complement and enhance the total services available to our constituency.

Crossing the threshold of our 20th-anniversary is a particularly appropriate time for us to take a big-picture look at our services and impact. Fortunately we have the help of a recently released report, which should be a strategic resource for all nonprofit and government agencies committed to the inclusion and full participation of people with disabilities. The Legal Aid Safety Net: A Report on the Legal Needs of Low-Income Illinoisans surveyed the services of 23 legal-aid providers in Illinois and the legal needs of 1,645 low-income households in the state for the year 2003.

The report found that the legal-service needs of the state's low-income population remains immense - half of all households surveyed faced one or more legal problems in 2003, and only 16% of those in need received legal assistance.

Low-income individuals with disabilities face even more precarious conditions: three-quarters of households with at least one person with a disability had legal troubles, a rate 50% greater than that of the total surveyed population. The study also found that the households of people with disabilities had more than twice the number of legal problems (3.6) as those of all surveyed households (1.7) in the surveyed year.

The study also compared the activities and impact of the 23 legalaid providers. It turns out that Equip for Equality handles the greatest number of legal cases related to education, over half of all education cases statewide. Tellingly, half of all education cases reported involve inappropriate or denied special-education services.

The report also found that Equip for Equality is the third largest provider of services for employment cases, following the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago and the Coordinated Advice & Referral Program for Legal Services (CARPLS).

It is difficult to overemphasize how remarkable our rankings are for education and employment, considering that Equip for Equality is restricted to disability-related issues, whereas most providers accept all low-income cases.

Among households of people with disabilities, the most common problems were: disability-related employment problems (35%), forced institutionalization due to a lack of community services (11%), issues of accommodation in or physical access to a building or facility (9%), housing discrimination (9%), and issues of accommodation by or access to government services (8%).

The Legal Aid report will go a long way to helping us shape our programs and collaborations (in particular during our annual planning process that is open to the public on June 2 at the Chicago Bar Association Building [see announcement on page 9]). It underscores the continuing demand for disabilityrights support in our state, especially in the areas of education and employment, and it provides us a with an arsenal of information that our state's policy makers would be loathe to ignore. Of the 10 most populous states, Illinois provides the smallest annual contribution to support legal aid: $480,000 versus an average of $6.1 million.

The introduction to The Legal Aid Safety Net stresses that: "A person who does not have meaningful access to our legal system does not enjoy the full benefits of citizenship, in the broadest sense of that word. A society that cannot make its legal system truly accessible to its citizens undermines the foundation of its democracy, its economy and its civil society." While we certainly have much to celebrate at this juncture in our history, both as an organization and as a community, the challenge of improving support to the vast numbers of people with disabilities whose legal needs go unmet year after year remains sobering. I call on each of you to take this report's findings to heart and join us in making full inclusion and equal access to justice a reality.

Access the executive summary and full report online.

Sponsors
The Chicago Bar Association
Illinois State Bar Association
The Chicago Bar Foundation
Illinois Bar Foundation
Lawyers Trust Fund of Illinois
Contributors
Lawyers Trust Fund of Illinois
The Chicago Community Trust
Joyce Foundation
Polk Bros. Foundation
The Chicago Bar Foundation
Illinois Bar Foundation
Caterpillar, Inc.
Francis Beidler Foundation

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