Instituting a Race-Conscious Practice in Legal Aid: One Program’s Effort

Legal Services of Northern California in October 2003 looked at racial disparities in health care, wealth, and housing and concluded that we, as a program, could no longer continue a poverty law practice that did not consciously confront these disparities. Here we describe our efforts to adopt a programwide, race-conscious approach to our advocacy through our Race Equity Project. We hope to encourage other programs that have incorporated similar race-conscious approaches to their work to share what they have learned with the broader public interest community. We also hope that programs that have not yet taken up this type of approach to advocacy work will consider doing so.