Team of 4 advocates working to:

WCLP’s Multi-Pronged Approach to Systemic Change:

Working across issue areas….

Building healthy communities in which residents have the opportunity to thrive requires a multi-pronged approach – one that WCLP has been employing for over four decades. At a minimum, Californians need:

• Safe and Affordable Housing. WCLP promotes the development of new affordable housing, preserves the stock of existing housing, and prevents homelessness by protecting tenants’ rights.
• Health Care. WCLP works to improve and expand health coverage, simplify eligibility and enrollment in Medi-Cal and indigent health care programs, and fight budget cuts to these critical programs.
• A Safety Net. WCLP ensures that CalWORKs and Food Stamps benefits are there for people when they need them, and that recipients get the educational and supportive services that will help them transition to independence.

Employing a variety of tools….

Effectively addressing the complex problems faced by low-income Californians requires creativity, flexibility and perseverance. WCLP uses:

• Legislative Advocacy. As “the voice” in Sacramento for poor Californians, we bring our in-depth expertise to bear in pursuing a realistic, incremental strategy for meaningful systemic change.
• Monitoring & Administrative Advocacy. Ever vigilant, we ensure that legislative intent translates into effective policies and procedures to benefit our clients.
• Impact Litigation.  When necessary, we enforce our clients’ rights by bringing class action lawsuits. This credible threat of litigation has earned us a “place at the table” where life and death decisions impacting our clients are made.

With decades of collective poverty law experience, WCLP advocates are viewed as the state’s experts in legal issues impacting our clients’ health, housing, and welfare. Some of our recent work includes:

• Strengthening Health Access through Collaboration. WCLP is an integral partner in the innovative Health Consumer Alliance, funded for a decade by The California Endowment. The HCA helps low-income consumers access health care and uses their collective experiences to inform policy advocacy efforts to address underlying causes of health care problems in the state.
• Promoting the Creation of New Affordable Housing: We lead a ground-breaking Redevelopment Housing Collaborative, which works to enforce laws requiring California’s 400+ redevelopment agencies to set aside and invest at least 20% of their funds to preserve, improve and increase affordable housing.  We also sponsored successful legislation that provided $2 billion in new affordable housing and homeless shelter beds.
• Preventing Homelessness:  We won an appellate court victory requiring cities to provide tenants with relocation assistance when they are displaced through gentrification and to replace the affordable units lost in the process.   We also achieved a landmark settlement against the City of Los Angeles and its Community Redevelopment Agency requiring both the payment of relocation assistance to several hundred low-income residents of the Alexandria Hotel and a policy change requiring the replacement of lost affordable units.
• Protecting the Safety Net. In the current state budget crisis, WCLP is leading a coalition of public interest groups in the court battle to prevent the state Controller from refusing to release funds to counties for the payment of CalWORKs benefits to California’s most vulnerable residents.
• Preservation of Affordable Housing. WCLP advocated and provided detailed analysis to successfully defeat Prop. 98, which would have eliminated protections such as rent stabilization relied on by our clients. We also worked to defeat numerous legislative bills that would be detrimental to our clients, including proposals to dilute low-income housing program requirements.
• Environmental Health. After years of advocacy by WCLP, the State of California adopted new regulations in May 2008 requiring lead-safe work practices in older homes, helping to significantly reduce lead levels in California’s children.
• Fighting Unfair Medical Debt: We won an appellate court victory ensuring that Medi-Cal recipients who pay out of pocket for medical care while waiting for their Medi-Cal applications to be processed get reimbursed for those expenses.
• Better Care for Foster Children: We reached an historic settlement with Los Angeles County to overhaul the foster care system – children will now be placed in homelike settings rather than institutions, they’ll be moved as little as possible, and they’ll be afforded the mental health services they need.
• Preserving Welfare Grant Levels: We won a court victory requiring California to pay higher welfare grants to families headed by those whose disabilities prevent work. In another case, we stopped an illegal policy denying teenage mothers full benefits. And we lead the annual fight in the legislature to prevent welfare cuts and preserve the annual cost of living adjustment.
• Health Care Access for People with Severe Disabilities: We secured a preliminary injunction preventing the closure of Los Angeles County’s Rancho Los Amigos Rehabilitation Center, which provides the only specialized care available for the County’s severely disabled population.
• Supporting Legal Aid Programs: Our expert poverty lawyers have trained a generation of legal services advocates. We respond each year to thousands of requests for advice, research, trainings, and educational materials, helping advocates provide the highest quality representation they can for their clients