Community Justice Advocate Programs
Regardless of where someone is within the debt timeline—from anticipating debt to receiving a judgment—Medical Debt Community Justice Advocates can provide legal advice and assistance.
Debt collection is the most common type of civil legal action in Utah, and one-third of all Utah debt collection cases are filed against people experiencing medical debt. The Medical Debt Legal Advocate Initiative empowers individuals at community-based organizations to give limited-scope legal advice to the community members they serve who are at risk of or are experiencing medical debt collection. The MDLA curriculum is the first in the nation to empower community members other than lawyers to give legal advice about medical debt.
Read more on Innovation for Justice's website: Medical Debt Legal Advocate Initiative
Interested in becoming an Advocate?
View our open application opportunities at the link below.
Interested in receiving legal help?
Find a Community Justice Advocate near you.
Engaging With Communities to Increase Financial Stability
Following community engagement through participatory action research, landscape analysis, and feedback on program prototypes, Innovation for Justice designed the Medical Debt Legal Advocate Program.
Debt collection is the most common type of civil legal action in Utah, and one-third of all Utah debt collection cases are filed against people experiencing medical debt. The Medical Debt Legal Advocate Initiative empowers community healthcare workers to give limited-scope legal advice to the community members they serve who are at risk of medical debt collection. An additional component of the Medical Debt Legal Advocate Initiative will train financial coaches to give limited-scope legal advice to community members who have received a ten-day notice of a medical debt collection lawsuit. These initiatives are the first in the nation to empower advocates other than lawyers to give legal advice about medical debt.
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.
