Legal Aid of North Carolina (LANC)

Legal Aid of North Carolina is a statewide, nonprofit law firm that provides free Legal services in civil matters to low-income people in order to ensure equal access to justice and to remove Legal barriers to economic opportunity. Lanc focuses its advocacy on cases that affect its clients' basic human needs - safety from violence, shelter and income - and cases involving systemic and structural injustices and inequalities that broadly affect low-income North carolinians. Lanc's core cases involve domestic violence, housing, public benefits, consumer rights, employment, education, health care, and disaster relief and recovery. Clients are generally people with incomes below 125% of the federal poverty level. Three-quarters of our clients are women, many of whom have minor children. Lanc serves roughly 22,000 clients a year in 100 counties of North Carolina. Lanc has more than 20 field offices and operates 15 statewide or regional projects that focus on discrete areas of law or serve special client populations. Lanc is a full-service law firm that provides a comprehensive array of services to clients, from advice and brief service to full representation in court. Lanc also conducts self-help Legal workshops that educate and empower clients to handle certain basic Legal issues themselves. Lanc also produces and distributes self-help and educational resources like handbooks, brochures and videos. In addition to proving high-quality Legal representation and counsel across the state to tens of thousands of low-income households, lanc administers various public benefits programs for qualified North Carolina citizens. For example, lanc is the administrator of the federal aca enrollment process in North Carolina. In this project, lanc staff serve as certified navigators to provide outreach and enrollment services to low-income North Carolina consumers about the affordable care act and assist them in enroliing in health insurance plans. In 2021 and 2022, lanc also acted as a community partner on various rental assistance projects. Lanc used its administraive resources and capacity to distribute rental assistance to low-income families in arrears and facing eviction. Lanc is currently operating a call center and assistance project, called ombudsman, on behalf of the state dhhs. This project assists patients from the 1.6m medicaid-eligible recipients in North Carolina who are experiencing medicaid access issues with providers. The ombudsmen help patients overcome obstacles to medicaid eligibility and reimbursement, including resolving misunderstandings or miscommunications between patients and providers. Lanc is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that is funded by a wide variety of sources, including federal grants, state court fees, charitable foundations, state and local bar associations, law firms and individuals. Nearly half of lanc's funding comes from the federal Legal services corporation, which is funded by a congressional appropriation for grants to civil Legal Aid organizations across the country.