East Bay Community Law Center

The East Bay Community Law Center’s mission is to promote justice and build a community that is more secure, productive, healthy, and hopeful by providing: (1) legal services and policy advocacy that are responsive to the needs of low-income communities, and (2) law training that prepares future attorneys to be skilled and principled advocates who are committed to addressing the causes and conditions of racial and economic injustice and poverty.

The East Bay Community Law Center provides legal advocacy through our eight program areas. Our strategies for each program area are as follow:

Housing: EBCLC’s Housing Clinic represents thousands of renters of color facing eviction every year, combating the displacement of Black and Latinx residents of Alameda County and providing relief to the community members most impacted by the Bay Area housing crisis.

Immigration:EBCLC’s Immigration Clinic’s "Kindergarten-to-College" school-based model breaks down barriers and makes it easy for parents and young people to access legal services in a place they feel safe. We provide ongoing legal aid services to undocumented residents, including students of color attending regional colleges in the Bay Area.

Community Economic Justice: EBCLC’s Community Economic Justice Clinic (CEJ) focuses on supporting the development of businesses owned by people of color and amplifying community voice in decision-making to create a more equitable local economy. Our services include leveraging specific legal tools to support entrepreneurs of color build successful businesses. At the local policy level, EBCLC advances affordable housing solutions that support communities most impacted by displacement stay in housing.

Consumer Justice: EBCLC’s Consumer Justice Clinic (CJC) represents under-resourced plaintiffs to release them from untenable debt, such as student loan debt, credit card debt, and debt to pay day lenders. Our litigators and law students have won cases against various debt settlement stakeholders who specifically target immigrants and communities of color.

Clean Slate: EBCLC’s Clean Slate Clinic advances transformative criminal justice reform policies directly informed by our system-impacted clients. Our direct legal services focus on providing wraparound legal support that removes barriers to employment for formerly incarcerated people. Our policy advocacy works to eliminate harmful fines and fees that trap systems-impacted individuals and their families into cycles of debt.

Education Defense and Advocacy for Youth: EBCLC’s Education, Defense, and Justice (EDJY) for Youth Clinic focuses on dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline. Currently, EDJY is working with school districts (Oakland Unified and Berkeley) to get police off of school campuses; closing youth jails; building a national coalition to reform and eventually abolish youth electronic monitoring, which primarily impacts students of color.

Health & Welfare: EBCLC’s Health and Welfare (H & W) Clinic utilizes an innovative Medical-Legal Partnership model, integrating lawyers directly into healthcare teams at high-need medical centers. This unique strategy has kept us on the frontlines of public health provision during the pandemic greatly expanding access to unemployment benefits and ensuring that immigrant and mixed-status families maintain access to healthcare and nutrition.

EBCLC closes the justice gap by providing high-quality legal services to low-income clients, as well as clinical education opportunities for law students. Since opening 34 years ago, EBCLC has grown to become the largest provider of free legal services in Alameda County, serving more than 5,000 – 7,000 clients and training over 150 students annually. In order to promote justice, EBCLC’s direct legal service delivery and clinical education methodology tackle the many interrelated causes that contribute to injustice. Our holistic representation extends beyond simply assisting a client with a legal issue. Instead, we ensure that all of our clients’ legal and social service needs – however complex and far-reaching – are addressed. Our community education and outreach work have the broadest reach in the neighborhoods we serve and is an integral part of our multimodal approach to community lawyering. With limited-scope assistance, EBCLC attorneys and staff guide clients through complex legal systems and help create individualized road maps tailored to the issues at hand. Informed by our direct services work with clients and community partners, we engage in policy advocacy at the local and state levels to ensure broad, long-lasting impact. From drafting bills and supporting legislation to advising government agencies on key policy changes, we gather knowledge from our direct legal advocacy and apply it to impact systemic change.

The East Bay Community Law Center is one of the largest legal aid services providers in California. Annually, we serve anywhere between 5,000-7,000 clients. We not only provide holistic services through our eight clinics, but also help educate more than 150 law students each year through our clinical education program.

Before the onset of coronavirus and economic recession, historical divestment from communities of color and the legacy of structural racism served as destabilizing forces in the lives of people EBCLC serves. COVID-19 has had devastating and disparate impacts on clients of color who are essential workers, renters, formerly incarcerated people, students, family matriarchs, and people experiencing homelessness. EBCLC has met these extraordinary times with holistic systems advocacy.

Two recent successes stand out:
EBCLC played a primary role in extending the East Bay’s moratorium on evictions through December 2020, making Alameda County’s eviction ban one of the strongest nationwide. The moratorium, which had been set to expire on September 30, 2020, came at a moment when thousands of unemployed residents lost their emergency federal unemployment benefits and COVID-19 cases hit their highest point in Alameda County. The stress of unstable housing results in disruptions to employment, social networks, education, and receipt of social service benefits. EBCLC’s policy advocacy to prevent eviction and displacement has been foundational to public health.

EBCLC’s primarily Black and Brown clients are more vulnerable to heart disease, asthma, high blood pressure, cancer, pregnancy mortality, intergenerational trauma, and now COVID-19. EBCLC has increased health and wellness community and school-based workshops to preemptively connect with clients who face the difficult combination of challenges across physical health, mental health, and housing to ensure that clients stay healthy and economically secure.

Because COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on the health and economic conditions of BlPOC families, EBCLC’s focus in 2021 is on stabilizing Black communities in California by addressing systemic racism, the primary driver of health disparities. EBCLC will focus on addressing three specific areas:
1. Continue the fight to keep families housed and in jobs beyond the eviction moratorium. EBCLC will advocate to keep people housed through the duration of these crises.
2. Work in close partnership with schools to ensure that updated information and resources are getting to undocumented students and other youth caught at the intersection of the education, criminal justice, and immigration systems.
3. Provide individual consultations and policy advocacy for formerly incarcerated individuals. Given that people who are formerly incarcerated are more likely to face poor health outcomes as they re-enter society, EBCLC is committed to implementing targeted solutions to improve the social determinants of their health.