Cancer Legal Care

Cancer Legal Care's overarching goal is to make legal care a recognized and fully integrated part of whole patient cancer care in the state of Minnesota.

Minnesotans affected by cancer make up a diverse community in terms of age, race, type of cancer, and geography, but experience a nearly universal threat to maintaining employment, insurance, housing, and financial supports as a result of their diagnosis and treatment. These social determinants of health (SDOH) all have legal underpinnings, yet disproportionately impact those who are least able to afford the services of an attorney. Access to free legal care is often the key to maintaining financial security and family stability at a very vulnerable time.
These are health problems that have legal, not medical, solutions.

Legal care is often the key to ensuring basic needs are met and means of providing short and long term financial security and family stability. Examples of the cancer community's need for legal care and the difference it makes one family at a time, include:
• Effectively negotiating an extended, job-protected leave in order to maintain employment during and after treatment.
• Understanding the critical timing issues of applying for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) so mistakes aren't made, resulting in an otherwise unnecessary delay in the receipt of cash benefits and medical coverage.
• Creating guardianship documents to ease the lives of children as they transition from the care of their deceased parent to another adult.

Cancer Legal Care's goal is to ensure that all who need legal care as part of their overall cancer treatment have access to it.

Cancer Legal Care is the only organization providing legal care services to Minnesota's cancer community and is a recognized leader in the state on the interplay of legal and health issues. The unique and complementary nature of our work along the continuum of cancer care represents a significant improvement in the lives of Minnesotans with cancer.

Cancer Legal Care's strategies for meeting our goals are based on the same strategies that helped us begin and grow. These include, Cancer Legal Care as:
• a recognized, innovative leader in expanding the definition of health care to include legal care.
• a convener, bringing together those who are able to provide pro bono legal care with those who are in desperate need of it.
• non-duplicative of other legal service agencies.
• led by a staff and board with demonstrated expertise, capacity, tenacity and passion.
• helping to lead a larger movement in the state of Minnesota integrating legal care in to health care settings via the establishment of the Upper Midwest Healthcare Legal Partnership Learning Collaborative

The heart of the success of Cancer Legal Care's work is based on the strength, breadth and depth of our most precious resource—relationships. Our relationships with
~clients are based on mutual regard, respect, and trust,
~our donors and foundation partners are at the heart of everything we have been able to accomplish,
~stakeholders in the medical, legal, dental, and cancer communities are based on deep trust
~and between staff and board are long-standing, and fueled by the ongoing desire to solidify CALL's presence on the horizon of Minnesota cancer care.

Cancer Legal Care is a recognized leader in state of Minnesota on the interplay of legal and health issues, and a trusted provider to legal care to the Minnesota cancer community.

Our board and staff are passionate and tenacious advocates and champions for our vision and mission.
Cancer Legal Care's success to date is due in large measure to the collaborative nature of our work across disciplines, allowing CALL as a small organization to have a much larger impact and reach than would otherwise be possible given this size of our budget and staff.

By convening the expertise and volunteer resources from our colleagues in the legal profession, with the oncology and cancer non-profit communities' identification of survivors in need, Cancer Legal Care has been able to make a significant and positive impact in the lives of our clients. The collaborative nature of these relationships is mutually beneficial and critical to the work we do. Our partners in the legal community find meaningful and vetted work to do in answering their professional call and desire to engage in pro bono practice, while at the same time permitting Cancer Legal Care to keep in-house staffing needs contained, small and nimble. Our medical collaborators provide Cancer Legal Care with a steady stream of clients in need of legal care. In return, these health care providers receive access to assistance for issues that have a direct impact on their patients' health outcomes, but go beyond what they, as doctors, nurses and social workers, are otherwise able to provide.

Cancer Legal Care's vision is to make legal care an indispensable part of the overall cancer care Minnesotans receive.

Our dream and vision for the future includes having such services available for oncology patients at their treating clinic. By being part of their onsite healthcare team, many of the barriers of accessing legal care are removed (one more call to make when emotional and physical reserves are at an all time low, fear and uncertainty as to contacting an attorney).