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By the end of the year, a long-time legal resource for low-income people in the area will close its doors forever.
And the decision by the Legal Services of Maumee Valley to cease operations comes at a time when more people may find themselves in need of its services.
The non-profit agency, which has existed since the 1960s, finds itself caught in a fight over dwindling resources available to those who provide free or nearly free legal assistance to those with little money.
The organization will provide advice-only assistance until the end of November.
“We’ve gotten to the point now where we don’t even have enough funding to keep the doors open on a very limited basis,” James Federoff, president of the organization’s board of directors, said.
With Legal Services of Maumee Valley’s closing, at least four other organizations remain in Allen County to provide legal assistance to the poor and elderly: Indiana Legal Services, Volunteer Lawyer Program of Northeast Indiana, Neighborhood Christian Legal Clinic, and the referral service at the Allen County Bar Association.
These agencies provide a variety of services to the area’s low-income residents – legal advice, family law, housing,consumer law, and aid in gaining access to government benefits.
It is the addition of some newer groups – Indiana Legal Services and the Neighborhood Christian Legal Clinic – that shrank the pot of money available to Legal Services of Maumee Valley, according to Steve Morgan, the business manager for the organization.
In the not-so-distant past, Legal Services of Maumee Valley received the majority of its funding from Legal Services Corp., a national grant-making organization that funnels money from federal sources to legal aid organizations around the country.
But in the late 1990s, Legal Services Corp. shifted how it provided funding, sending all money earmarked for the Hoosier state to the Indiana Legal Services main office in Indianapolis, where it was then sent out to branches around the state, including one in Fort Wayne that serves a 10-county area in northeast Indiana.
Since 2002, all the Legal Services Corp. dollars coming into Fort Wayne have gone to Indiana Legal Services, said Jennifer Helms, manager of the Fort Wayne agency.
There had been talk of a merger between Indiana Legal Services, Legal Services of Maumee Valley and the other organizations, officials said.
But to Legal Services of Maumee Valley, that felt like more of a takeover than a get-together, and it passed on the opportunity, Morgan said.
So the organization pulled on some other sources of funding – victims’ assistance money from the U.S. Department of Justice, annual money from the state’s Civil Legal Aid Fund, and grants from Aging and In-Home Services and the City of Fort Wayne.
“We soldiered on for a number of years,” Morgan said.
But the remaining funding sources continued to shrink, and that led other grant-making organizations to decide to put their money in agencies more financially stable, creating a vicious cycle of decreasing money leading to decreasing services leading to a further decrease in funding.
“It was just enough to deprive our organization of the funds needed to do any kind of job at all,” Morgan said. “It became a self-fulfilling prophecy. … It can spiral downward once people lose confidence.
“When they withdraw funding from your program, they basically guarantee you won’t have the opportunity (to provide services).”
And the money goes to those agencies with more clients, Helms said.
Indiana Legal Services is also feeling a pinch, she said, as funding decreases nationwide.
“There’s a smaller pot, and it’s divided across the whole United States. Every legal aid is fighting for money,” she said.
The problem of fewer dollars coming into the community is exacerbated by the fact that the various programs in the area have not worked well together over the past nine years, Morgan said.
“That is a cause for disappointment and concern,” Morgan said. “None of these programs is adequately funded, but at a time of growing need, clearly increasing need, we now have a reduced capacity to respond to the need.”
Federoff and Morgan worry about what they see as a gap in service, a gap they were able to fill even as their resources dwindled away.
Some of the programs, such as Indiana Legal Services and Volunteer Lawyer Program, can have a lengthy waiting period for some services because of the number of clients needing help, Morgan said.
Others agencies, such as the Neighborhood Christian Legal Clinic, can only help a few clients at a time, Morgan said, so Legal Services of Maumee Valley offered consultation services where they could, trying to mitigate the waiting periods.
Legal aid programs are always important and should be protected, Morgan said.
“Legal aid programs that handle civil law matters really help encourage trust and faith in our judicial system,” he said. “It is a way of balancing access to the courts and legal information and advice.
“There is little doubt that something like this is needed … It’s just a question of what resources are there to provide it.”
rgreen@jg.net
