CIVIC-FA Track B: Bridging the Rural Justice Gap: Innovating & Scaling Up Civil Access to Justice

In the U.S., underfunded rural infrastructure and corresponding inequities in employment, health care, and education put individuals at high risk for civil legal problems. Yet many rural regions have few if any attorneys. The resulting gap between common civil issues like debt collection, domestic violence, and eviction on the one hand, and access to legal assistance on the other, is profoundly consequential to community resilience and health.

These consequences are amplified in Alaska, where only 1.13 attorneys are available for every 10,000 Alaskans in poverty. In response, Alaska Legal Services Corporation recently developed the community justice worker (CJW) program, which trains individuals embedded in Alaska’s rural communities to provide formal legal advocacy and practice insights.

By scaling up the CJW program, this project is directly addressing the civil legal needs of rural and Indigenous communities in Alaska. It is also contributing to local health and welfare, regional economic empowerment, and transformative legal aid delivery practices across the U.S.

Leveraging scientific and policy insights, regional expertise, and local relationships, the project team is: 1) Developing formal training, supervising, and credentialing processes for CJWs; 2) Growing best practices for recruiting and retaining CJWs and for workforce development; 3) Testing short- and long-term sustainability models for CJW infrastructure; and 4) Creating a framework for evaluation and evidence-based practices. Through rigorous, mixed-methodological data collection (qualitative interviews, survey and training data), continuous review and engagement with local stakeholders and Community Advisory Board members, and ongoing development and testing of a CJW evaluation metric that abides by the principles of Indigenous data sovereignty and policy, this project is at once advancing science, law, and justice.

It is also contributing to legal aid efforts by demonstrating that a culturally-appropriate, spatially-responsive, and people-centered model of legal service delivery is possible.

The CIVIC Innovation Challenge is a collaboration with Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, and the National Science Foundation.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.