Western Center on Law and Poverty

Our team works tirelessly to make sure Californians are protected in California law by addressing the following:

HOUSING AND HOMELESSNESS

We will ensure that residents have access to healthy, sustainable, and affordable housing in neighborhoods of their choosing, and we advocate for strong, clear, and enforceable anti-displacement protections. All of our work seeks to address California’s housing crisis and its disproportionate effects on the most vulnerable Californians and unhoused individuals by:

Focusing on tenant protections so families stay housed during and after the pandemic, and that
they are not burdened with debt accrued through no fault of their own.

Enforcing fair housing to protect vulnerable communities from harassment and discrimination in housing.

Prioritizing land use and environmental justice and ensuring that California focuses on equitable development in healthy communities free from pollution and other environmental dangers.

Helping to prevent and end homelessness through cross-team and cross-issue initiatives such as increasing housing opportunities and funding for unhoused communities, including formerly incarcerated, veterans, LGBTQ people, and elderly individuals.

HEALTH CARE

At Western Center, we believe access to health care is a human right. We work with our community partners and government agencies to provide equitable access to health care for all Californians, especially during this unprecedented health crisis. This includes ensuring no one is removed from coverage, and for those who are, coverage is immediately restored. Our priorities include:

Expanding Medi-Cal to cover all Californians who need it and ensuring that Medi-Cal plans and providers deliver equitable, quality care.

Advocating for improvements to health programs that serve Californians with low incomes, particularly addressing health disparities for Black and Latinx communities.

Enforcing health consumer rights and protections.

FINANCIAL SECURITY AND ACCESS TO JUSTICE

We will provide a roadmap to financial security for the people who need it most, and fight for all California families to have sufficient income to afford basic necessities. This includes:

Increasing enrollment and retention, and where applicable, benefit levels across all safety net programs that serve low-income Californians such as California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs), CalFresh, and Supplemental Security Income (SSI).

Securing or expanding CalFresh emergency food programs and pandemic food programs to relieve the continued and historic levels of hunger due to COVID-19.

Expanding programs like the California Earned Income Tax Credit (CalEITC) to allow low-income families to keep the money they earn.

Fighting to end the high costs of poverty by reducing or eliminating high fees, fines, and costs associated with the criminal justice system, traffic courts, parking tickets, and towing of cars.

By applying a coordinated concert of tools including legislative and policy advocacy, high impact litigation, administrative advocacy, and technical assistance and education for legal service and community-based organizations to each of our priority areas, Western Center ensures that low-income Californians receive the support they are entitled to, and fights for them to keep the precious assets they do have. Our tools include:
Administrative Advocacy: Western Center works with county, city, and state administrators to ensure policies and procedures are implemented properly across California to protect and uplift Californians living in poverty. Sometimes a simple shift in procedure, or guidance and encouragement from our advocates, can make a difference in real life outcomes for hundreds of thousands of Californians.

Budget Advocacy: While budget advocacy often proceeds quietly, its impact on individuals and families can be far reaching and life changing. Western Center’s advocacy pushes the state to use its budget to bring California closer to true economic and racial equity.

Impact Litigation: Western Center files litigation across California to ensure the laws to protect and support Californians with low incomes — laws we often sponsor in Sacramento — are upheld by government and private entities. Good laws mean nothing without enforcement.

Policy Advocacy: Western Center’s state policy work centers on advancing legislation that gets to the heart of the issues causing California’s massive income inequality, unsustainable housing market, lack of access to health care, and destructive systems of justice.

Technical Assistance: Western Center attorneys and advocates assist hundreds of legal services and community-based advocates throughout the state and nation. Community-based advocates and legal aid attorneys are often the only line of defense for people with low incomes when they are forced to navigate complex legal issues. In that way, Western Center’s support of and collaboration with local advocates and legal aid attorneys ripples across communities we all serve.

Western Center was formed by a passionate group of attorneys and legal scholars who sought to create a unique organization, driven by the belief that all Californians deserve the finest possible legal representation before the institutions that shape their lives.

Western Center was founded in 1967 and is a 501(c)(3) organization with offices in Los Angeles, Sacramento and Oakland. Our operating budget for 2023 is $6.5M and our diverse revenue model includes grants and contracts, individual and corporate contributions, event revenue, attorneys' fees and cy pres awards to ensure access to services and entitlements for more than eight million Californians living in poverty each year. Our supporters include regional and national funders, such as the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Stupski Foundation, California Health Care Foundation, Blue Shield of California FoundationThe California Wellness Foundation, and The California Endowment. Western Center also values building on its current endowment as a means to provide financial sustainability for the organization.

Our 31 staff members, community and legal services partners and pro bono attorneys serve all 58 counties in the state, focusing on low-income Californians living at or below 125% of the federal poverty level. Western Center's issue teams of health care, housing and public benefits include 14 attorneys and advocates with leadership and advice provided by our executive director, an active member of the California bar, director of litigation, special counsel and general counsel. Our 40-member Board is drawn from industries including law, finance, health care academia and the nonprofit sector.

In 2022 we achieved the following:  

Our impact litigation yielded significant wins to keep Californians housed and food secure. In Warren v. the City of Chico, we won a preliminary injunction where the city agreed to build individual shelters for unhoused residents and people can no longer be arrested or cited for sleeping outside when shelter is unavailable. We secured a preliminary statewide injunction in Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) Action and Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE) v. California Housing and Community Development, pausing emergency rental assistance application denials until the program can meet constitutional standards of due process. We also secured a permanent injunction in Hunger Action Los Angeles, et al. v. County of Los Angeles, et al., requiring the county to process and approve emergency CalFresh food applications within 3 days.  

Our lawsuits filed in 2022 include Guardianship of Espinoza, which attempts to establish a right to counsel in probate guardianship hearings and Tesfai v. Dept. of Health Care Services challenging the practice of denying replacement prosthetics to Medi-Cal Dental beneficiaries under conditions more restrictive than the governing statute allows. Additionally, we filed an appeal in Abney v. Dept. of Health Care Services, seeking to reverse a superior court decision in a case about Medi-Cal eligibility and its "available" income regulation. 

 Thirteen of our co-sponsored bills were signed into law, including groundbreaking legislation like SB 972, modernizing street vending licensing and SB 923, a first in nation bill on gender affirming health care. Our administrative and budget advocacy resulted in Medi-Cal expansions for immigrants of all ages, seniors, and persons with disabilities and the largest increase in CalWORKs cash assistance grants since the program's inception in 1998.