Community Justice Advocate Programs
Housing instability impacts individuals and communities throughout the state, and has the potential to have lasting financial, health, and employment consequences.
Housing Stability Community Justice Advocates work with tenants to evaluate their situation and provide legal help throughout the process.
Engaging With Communities to Increase Housing Stability
Following community engagement through participatory action research, landscape analysis, and feedback on program prototypes, Innovation for Justice designed the Housing Stability Legal Advocate Program.
Housing instability disproportionately impacts lower-income community members, the vast majority of whom are renters. For lower-income community members, housing is simply unaffordable. In Arizona and Utah, there are about 30 affordable housing units for every 100 extremely lower-income renter households, and more than 70% of extremely low-income renters are paying more than half of their income on rent. For severely rent-burdened households, one emergency or unexpected expense could result in eviction, displacement, and homelessness.
Tenants confronted with an inability to pay rent lack the resources and capacity to navigate and secure siloed social and legal services needed to maintain housing stability. Housing Stability Community Justice Advocates are community members from the non-profit social service sector who obtain HSLA certification in the course and scope of their social service work, and embed upstream, trauma-informed, limited-scope legal advice related to housing issues in the delivery of their social services.
Innovation for Justice (i4J) is a virtual social justice innovation lab that creates new, replicable, and scalable strategies for legal empowerment. i4J is housed at both the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law and the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business.
i4J’s work in the space is unique because it emphasizes the importance and inclusion of four diverse system actors in design work:
(1) Community members who are in a position to leverage UPL reform opportunities;
(2) Community-members who would benefit from services authorized through UPL reform mechanisms;
(3) UPL reform decision-makers; and
(4) The design hub: an inclusive research and design entity who can gather legal need information from the first three system actors and help synthesize the potentially divergent goals of these 3 system actors into effective new legal service models.
The first three system actors interface at various opportunity spaces in the system of civil justice problem-solving; the design hub brings these system actors to the table to work together to create systems and services that are more equitable and informed by multiple perspectives. This includes and emphasizes the perspectives, lived, and learned experience of community members historically and actively excluded from access to justice decision-making conversations.
While most of the projects in i4J’s Service Impact Area focus on UPL-reform-based interventions, there is also opportunity for legal service innovation within the existing regulatory structure. This includes projects that focus on engaging diverse system actors in new programs and designing service models that get closer to the existing regulatory line.
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