Program:
Marriage Project
- Budget:
-
$8,431,888
- Category:
-
Civil Rights, Social Action & Advocacy
- Population Served:
-
Gays/Lesbians
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Children and Youth (infants - 19 years.)
Program Description:
Lambda Legal's Marriage Project is committed to securing public respect for solemnized same-sex unions, to win civil marriage equality for same-sex couples in targeted states, and to protect all same-sex couples when marriage equality is not an option.
Program Long-Term Success:
Lambda Legal's Marriage Project will continue to seek an end to discrimination in access to civil marriage so that same-sex couples in this country have the same choices other couples have, including whether or not to marry.
Program Short-Term Success:
Lambda Legal helped launch one of the largest and most significant chapters in the LGBT movement for equality in 1993 when we entered into the case Baehr v. Miike seeking marriage equality before Hawaii’s highest court. Since then, Lambda Legal's Marriage Project has been involved in on-going courtroom work in California and Iowa, as well as critical “out-of-court” advocacy occurring in New Jersey, New York, Illinois and Maryland, among other states.
Program Success Monitored by:
The Marriage Project is lead by Lambda Legal’s senior council, Jenny Pizer. Since joining Lambda Legal, Jenny has served as co-counsel in the intensive marriage equality litigation in both Washington State and California, which led to the historic <em>In re Marriage Cases</em> victory in May 2008, and now is co-counsel in <em>Strauss v. Horton</em>, the LGBT community's challenge to Proposition 8, the November 2008 ballot measure that purported to change California's Constitution to eliminate gay and lesbian couples' fundamental right to marry. Jenny often advises policymakers on protecting same-sex couples and their families. Outside California, Pizer has helped secure victories that have advanced LGBT civil rights in Washington, Oregon, Montana and Alaska. She is a frequent advocate for LGBT family equality in academic and public settings and to the media. She repeatedly has been named one of the top women litigators in California by the Los Angeles and San Francisco <em>Daily Journal</em>, and has received numerous professional achievement and community service awards.
Program Success Examples:
Along with the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal’s Marriage Project helped in the California Supreme Court case that resulted in full marriage equality for California’s same-sex couples on May 15, 2008.
<p>Lambda Legal is also working with these sisters organization to overthrow Proposition 8 in California, a voter imitative passed in November 2008 that took away same-sex couples’ right to marry in the state. Oral argument for this case, <em>Strauss v. Horton</em>, were heard by the California Supreme Court on March 5, 2009 and a final decision in pending. </p>
<p>The Marriage Project also has a case pending in the Iowa Supreme Court to extend full civil marriage equality to same-sex couples in Iowa. The case was heard by the court in December 2008, with a final decision to come sometime in 2009. The Marriage Project has also been working with the state based equality organization One Iowa to advance public education on marriage equality and build support for a positive court verdict</p>
<p>Our work in New York was particularly promising since marriages cannot be legally recognized in that state, but thanks to the Marriage Project’s strategic case work and a gubernatorial decree, legal marriages performed in other jurisdictions are recognized as valid in the state </p>
<p>Lambda Legal won a declaration from the New Jersey Supreme Court in the case <em>Lewis v. Harris</em>, which stated barring same-sex couples from the rights and benefits of marriage violated the constitutional promise of equality. The court gave the New Jersey Legislature a deadline of 180 days to correct the violation, and the legislature chose to create the separate status of civil unions. As a result, Lambda Legal created a Civil Union Watch to monitor that couples entering into New Jersey civil unions were receiving the same rights as marriages couples. </p>
Program:
Proyecto Igualdad
- Budget:
-
$8,431,888
- Category:
-
Civil Rights, Social Action & Advocacy
- Population Served:
-
Ethnic/Racial Minorities -- Other Specified Group
-
Hispanics
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Gays/Lesbians
Program Description:
Proyecto Igualdad extends Lambda Legal's resources and information to Spanish speakers and seeks to engage the many Latino/Hispanic communities. We provide bilingual educational materials, host community events and trainings and offer bilingual legal assistance through our Help Desks around the country.
Program Long-Term Success:
Proyecto Igualdad works toward the following objectives: (1) Strengthen Lambda Legal’s existing initiatives and tactics to place accessible civil rights information into the hands of LGBT Latinos nationwide; (2) establish and strengthen the links between Lambda Legal and national, state or local LGBT Latino/a organizations; (3) identify and establish organizational links between Lambda Legal and legal and/or mainstream organizations that predominantly serve Latino/a populations; (4) work with national coalition partners to increase the coverage of LGBT Latino/a civil rights issues in the Latino/a and Spanish-language press.
Program Short-Term Success:
<div>Proyecto will continue to educate and engage members of the Hispanic National Bar Association (HNBA), which represents the interests of more than 100,000 attorneys, judges, law professors, legal assistants, and law students. Proyecto has led legal educational seminars on LGBT rights at HNBA conferences and created the HNBA’s first LGBT Caucus. Proyecto remains instrumental in helping to formalize and activate the caucus.
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<div>Proyecto will continue to develop strategies to engage members of Latino/a communities in meaningful dialogue about LGBT and HIV issues. For example Proyecto is creating a training curriculum to educate Latino/as about the diverse faces of LGBT Latino/as as a means to counteract the homophobia and transphobia. </div>
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Program Success Monitored by:
<p>Lambda Legal's lead communiyt educator, Francisco Duenas, organizes and spearheads all of Proyecto Igualdad's work. As such, he helps create and implement Lambda Legal's Latino-specific public education campaigns aimed at persuading and challenging the Latino public to be supportive of our cases and the expansion of civil rights for LGBT people and people with HIV. Francisco also reports back to Lambda Legal on the needs of Latino LGBT and HIV-positive communities across the country.</p>
Program Success Examples:
<div>During the coalition efforts to defeat Proposition 8 in California, Proyecto helped plan community events, identified and trained Latino/a spokespeople, planned and executed outreach to Spanish language media, and helped translate educational resources into Spanish.
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Proyecto worked with partner organizations to create the Latino/a Coalition for Justice/Los Angeles. This effort is the only Latino/a collaborative effort on LGBT issues in Los Angeles and is a powerful tool for increasing support within the Latino/a LGBT and HIV rights communities in the city.</div>
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<div>Proyecto has also implemented agency-wide efforts to improve or translate Lambda Legal’s core educational materials for LGBT Latino/as.</div>
Program:
Youth in Out-of-Home Care Project
- Budget:
-
$8,431,888
- Category:
-
Civil Rights, Social Action & Advocacy
- Population Served:
-
Youth/Adolescents only (14 - 19 years)
-
Homeless
-
Gays/Lesbians
Program Description:
<p>Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) young people are in America's child welfare and juvenile justice systems in disproportionate numbers. According to the Lambda Legal report <em>Youth in the Margins</em>, one of every 10 to 20 adolescents in out-of-home care is lesbian or gay, and the National Network of Runaway and Youth Services estimates that 20 to 40 percent of young people who become homeless each year are lesbian, gay or bisexual. And yet, very few state foster care agencies maintain policies prohibiting discrimination against foster care youth on the basis of sexual orientation or require training for foster parents or foster care staff on sensitivity to LGBTQ youth. As a result, LGBT youth in care services often face neglect, discrimination and abuse at the hands of the child welfare systems charged to protect them. </p>
Program Long-Term Success:
<p>The Youth in Out-of-Home Care Project’s future work will entail: 1) taking on impact litigation to protect and defend the rights of at-risk LGBTQ youth in care as needed; 2) working in coalition with allies to advocate on behalf of individual teens or all out-of-home LGBTQ youth collectively; 3) providing direct technical assistance to public and private agencies to eliminate discriminatory practices that adversely affect low-income, at-risk LGBTQ youth in care; and 4) delivering educational programs and materials on the rights of LGBTQ youth in care to child welfare practitioners, foster parents, court personnel and youth advocates. </p>
Program Short-Term Success:
In 2008, the Project formed two new collaborative partnerships with the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and the Council of Social Work Education (CSWE). With help from the Project’s team and funding by Wellspring Advisors, NASW is leading a Train The Trainer initiative to improve how services are delivered to LGBTQ youth in out-of-home care and plans to educate 40 Master Trainers who have each pledged to train at least 40 more service providers. To further a systemic change in the treatment of LGBTQ youth in care, the Project is also teaming with CSWE on a survey intended to diagnose how schools of social work are training future care providers to deal with the needs of LGBTQ youth. The Project will work alongside CSWE to structure the final report to include suggestions on how schools of social work can improve their students’ competence to care for LGBTQ youth.
<p>Along with allied organizations, the Project will work to lead the federal government to improve existing policies or create new policies to protect LGBTQ youth in care.</p>
<p>Lambda Legal will also continue to manage the National Advisory Network (NAN) a network of social workers and other services providers who are concerned with the state of out-of-home care for LGBTQ youth, which was created in collaboration with CWLA. With a 200 plus membership, the group will sustain and increase the dialogue about LGBTQ youth in care.</p>
<p>Project’s attorneys will also continue to oversee a special telephone hotline that LGBTQ youth in care can call to ask questions about their legal rights and/or to seek help in solving a particular problem related to their care.</p>
<p>A staple of the Project’s work is presenting at national and regional conferences, lectures, workshops and summits focused on youth in care.</p>
Program Success Monitored by:
Lambda Legal’s Senior Council, Susan Sommer, is the director of the Youth in Out-of-Home Care Project. Susan led a historic joint partnership between Lambda Legal and the Child Welfare League of America that will make LGBT youth a clear priority for state and local children's agencies around the country.
Program Success Examples:
<div>Lambda Legal and CWLA sponsored 13 regional “listening forums” nationwide so out-of-home LGBTQ youth could vocalize their struggles to caseworkers. The 600+ child welfare practitioners that attended the forums were astounded by the frank testimony of these adolescents, and many of these professionals now help Lambda Legal to educate their colleagues about the needs of out-of-home LGBTQ youth living in foster care, homeless shelters and juvenile justice systems across the United States.<br />
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<div>Lambda Legal and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project brought a lawsuit on behalf of a transgender youth denied appropriate medical care while she lived in the custody of New York’s foster care system. Following a positive victory, Lambda Legal worked to ensure that New York State Office of Children and Family Services enforced a non-discrimination policy based on actual or perceived sexual orientation.</div>
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<div>Lambda Legal provided support to Puerto Rico’s Office of Child and Family Services (<strong>ADFAN</strong>) to improve the quality of care it offers to LGBTQ youth. We urged ADFAN case workers to acknowledge and accept young people’s sexual orientation rather than trying to change it, and pushed for the institution to prohibit negative behaviors towards LGBTQ people.</div>
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Child welfare officials from several states, including Rhode Island, Arizona, Wisconsin, Hawaii, New York, Nevada, California, Illinois, Connecticut and the District of Columbia, have approached Lambda Legal over the past seven years, seeking technical assistance on issues that impact out-of-home LGBTQ teens.</div>
Program:
HIV Project
- Budget:
-
$8,431,888
- Category:
-
Civil Rights, Social Action & Advocacy
- Population Served:
-
People With Aids (pwas)
-
Disabled, General or Disability Unspecified
-
Gays/Lesbians
Program Description:
Lambda Legal’s HIV Project has helped maintain or expand protections across the country for people living with HIV by pursuing impact litigation, education and advocacy to combat bias and stereotypes and to ensure that people are treated fairly by employers, health care providers and others. We also apply our legal expertise to policy issues affecting people living with HIV — including HIV testing, collection of private information about behaviors and sexual partners, access to medical care and treatment and HIV prevention.
Program Long-Term Success:
<p>The HIV Project work's toward the following objectives: 1) combat discrimination, bias and stigma, and advance and protect the legal rights of people living with HIV through advocacy and litigation; 2) guarantee access to quality healthcare for people with HIV through advocacy and litigation; 3) promote and protect effective prevention programs through advocacy and litigation; 4) advocate for the equal treatment of people living with HIV in additional areas, such as protecting confidentiality of HIV status, ensuring access to medically accurate information, protecting parental rights, protecting the rights of immigrants with HIV, and protecting the rights of prisoners with HIV; and 5) expand the HIV Project’s influential role on HIV issues with the public, other advocacy groups, policy makers, and the mainstream media and use our knowledge and experience to educate the public and policymakers on HIV discrimination and HIV myths.</p>
Program Short-Term Success:
In the immediate future, the HIV Project will take the following actions: pursue impact litigation to guarantee access by people living with HIV to quality health care and disability protections; work with the new presidential administration and Congress to advocate for changes needed to protect the civil rights of people living with HIV; monitor the expansion of HIV testing; monitor the Social Security Administration’s treatment of people disabled by HIV; remove barriers for HIV travelers entering the U.S.; enforce the ADA Amendments Act; stop public and private Insurers from limiting treatment to people living with HIV; act as a resource for national and local HIV advocates; and protecting the rights of incarcerated people living with HIV.
Program Success Monitored by:
The HIV Project is headed by Lambda Legal’s senior council, Bebe Anderson. Before joining Lambda Legal’s HIV Project, Bebe served as co-executive director for the HIV Law Project, and before that she worked for the Center of Reproductive Rights.
Program Success Examples:
Spanning all three decades of the AIDS epidemic, Lambda Legal achieved the follow milestones: 1) filed the first AIDS discrimination lawsuit in 1983, to prevent a doctor from being evicted because he was treating patients with HIV. This case set an important precedent, establishing important rights for people living with HIV in the early years of the epidemic; 2) helped to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to extend the protections in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to persons with asymptomatic HIV; 3) successfully stopped insurers’ efforts to place a cap on AIDS related treatments; 4) persuaded the federal Veterans Administration and some state Medicaid programs to revise overly restrictive policies which limited access to vitally needed organ transplants for people living with HIV; 5) convinced the US State Department to drop its blanket ban on hiring people with HIV, which it did in 2008 after our five year legal battle against the federal government (<em>Taylor v. Rice</em>).
Program:
Health Care Fairness
- Budget:
-
$8,431,888
- Category:
-
Health Care
- Population Served:
-
Gays/Lesbians
-
People With Aids (pwas)
-
Ethnic/Racial Minorities -- General
Program Description:
LGBT people and people living with HIV face particular heath challenges and difficulties obtaining appropriate health care due to hostility and discrimination. Difficulties in obtaining health care and health insurance can be especially devastating for those already most vulnerable, including those with limited income, newer immigrants, those who speak limited English, those with less education, many people of color, and many seniors. Lambda Legal helps LGBT people and people with HIV fight back when they are in lawfully denied coverage or care or when their relationships or health care choices are not given the respect they’re entitled to under the law.
Program Long-Term Success:
<p>Lambda Legal’s long-term Health Care Fairness objectives include: 1) pursue litigation, policy development, public education, advocacy and media opportunities to strengthen and enforce regulations protecting LGBT people and those living with HIV in health care institutions; 2) secure equal recognition of same-sex partnerships in hospital visitation policies, nursing home and assisted living facilities, and medical decision making including end-of-life care; 3) secure equal coverage for domestic partners through heath insurance and heath plans; 4) eliminate discriminatory transgender exclusions in insurance policies and Medicaid/care plans; 5) and engage in health care policy reform at the national level by advocating for LGBT and HIV heath care issues to be addressed by the federal government. </p>
Program Short-Term Success:
Lambda Legal is currently involved in various Health Care Fairness court case. In one case, <em>Langbehn v. Jackson Memorial Hospital</em>, Lambda Legal is challenging a hospital's decision to keep a lesbian from visiting her dying partner. This case illustrates the need for hospitals to recognize the legitimacy of same-sex relationships so that loved ones are not kept apart at a time when they most need each other. Furthermore, hospitals are fully responsible for adhering to national standards for accreditation and should be held liable if those standards are not met.
<p>In addition to courtroom work, Lambda Legal’s community educators are working on a Heath Care Fairness Campaign - a national campaign combining advocacy, public education, and grassroots mobilization - to bring awareness to the everyday discrimination LGBT and HIV positive people face from health care providers and institutions. This multifaceted campaign will include the following actions: (1) conduct a national survey to gather statistics about the types of healthcare discriminations LGBT and HIV communities face; (2) with the help of allied health care fairness organizations, advocate to the federal government to advance policies that will end bias and discriminatory behavior against members of the LGBT communities; (3) partner with national and local allied organizations to develop public education around health care fairness and implement tools to mobilize citizens to take action for policy changes that support LGBT and HIV rights; (4) create a draft policy for hospitals to consider for “end of life care” and “family recognition” that is inclusive of same-sex partners and sensitive to the needs of LGBT people; and (5) use allied partnerships and grassroots mobilization to create support for Lambda Legal’s health care fairness litigation.</p>
Program Success Monitored by:
Program Success Examples:
<div>In the case <em>Benitez v. North Coast Women's Care Medical Grou</em><em>p, Lambda Legal secured a victory from the California Supreme Court that states health care providers cannot use their religious beliefs to deny services to patients. </em></div>
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<div><em>Lambda Legal has also recently filed a case on women who was denied surgery by her doctor because of her HIV status. As a result, the women had to wait several months before she could have the surgery from another health care provider.
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</em>Lambda Legal has also published a life planning tool-kit, a portion of which is designed to help same-sex partners protect themselves in a hospital setting by preparing legal documents in advance.</div>