Mission
Beyond Legal Aid unites lawyers and activists in a collaborative pursuit for justice by leveraging legal services to benefit the most marginalized communities and individuals. Beyond is changing legal aid.
We are changing how lawyers and communities work together. Our lawyers work with activists to help their communities access justice and pursue social change.
Model
Beyond Legal Aid’s community activism lawyering model shifts legal aid toward a more equitable, community-driven method of lawyering. We’re not only closing the justice gap; we’re redistributing the law’s power into the hands of our community partners, supporting the people most impacted by injustices to be leaders in social change instead of recipients of transactional legal services.
Through transformative partnerships with communities, combining our lawyering with their activism, we achieve more impact than lawyers working alone.
Community-located, community-operated, community-directed
Beyond Legal Aid collaborates with underserved communities through the process of building locally-owned legal aid programs.
The community owns these programs; community members and leaders staff and run the programs in partnership with Beyond’s legal team. All legal work is collaborative, and conducted within partners’ spaces.
Our team commits to a critical starting point:
We can achieve social justice only when lawyers work with—and are directed by—community members, leaders, and activists. The community controls our work; they decide the areas of law we practice and determine the cases we take—and even how we handle them. Beyond's role is to support, empower, advise, and follow their decision-making.