Kalamazoo Defender is a non-profit public defender office, providing our clients zealous legal representation with a holistic lens.
Racism, trauma, and other systemic barriers often contribute to our clients’ legal situations. We know that the cycle of injustice they have experienced will repeat itself within the court system if no action is taken. This cycle results in extended sentences, repeated charges, and continued individual and familial trauma.
Kalamazoo Defender works to break these cycles for our clients by reducing barriers to needed services. Our highly skilled legal team provides legal representation within the court system. Our multidisciplinary care hub, The Village, facilitates client engagement with social services.
Delivering a Holistic Approach
Kalamazoo Defender was created through the insights and hard work of local attorneys, former judges, mental and public health experts, and community advocates working with the under-served of Kalamazoo County. We are dedicated to recruiting and training attorneys who possess the requisite passion for defense work and demonstrated abilities to become outstanding in their profession.
The model in which those attorneys will practice is often referred to as a “holistic” public defender. That term is used to define public defender offices that represent the whole client, including assessment and guidance in addressing collateral legal and other issues that impede a client's abilities to grow beyond a life on the margins.
Criminal defendants from impoverished communities don't end up facing charges in a vacuum. Racism and barriers to safe housing, mental health services, education, nutrition, banking, and other basic needs put those living in impoverished communities at substantially greater risk of confronting criminal charges. Kalamazoo Defender will work with its clients to ensure they have the resources and community support to overcome barriers to a more stable and rewarding life, regardless of the disposition of the criminal charge.
Engaging with the Community
Holistic responses to poverty mandate collaboration with community service providers in order to be effective. Kalamazoo has a rich reservoir of existing resources and initiatives that intersect with the core mission of Kalamazoo Defender, and integration with those resources—not duplication of the same—will be indispensable.
Building ongoing relationships with community organizations such as the United Way, Family Health Center, Kalamazoo Community Mental Health, Legal Aid, neighborhood associations, fair housing organizations, and countless others will not only ensure better service to our clients, it will better inform our mission.
To be successful, Kalamazoo Defender must lift up the voices of our clients and properly represent their interests. To this end, our professional staff must spend time in our clients' communities. Accountability in this respect will be ensured by a Board of Directors with diverse backgrounds and competencies.
Addressing Systemic Issues
Kalamazoo Defender cannot represent the community it serves if it ignores systemic barriers to success, outside the constraints of individual criminal cases. We would fail our clients if we do not use the opportunity presented by their entry into the criminal justice system to ensure it is their last entry.
In order to set our clients up for success, we will engage social workers and public health experts, employ attorneys with experience representing the indigent in civil matters, and create relationships with community organizations that are on the ground in the communities from which Kalamazoo Defender's clients come.
Social workers possess the professional skill to assess the struggles individuals confront within the context of their communities and life experiences, and are the best situated to identify the types of resources that would help our clients confront those struggles and adopt an approach to mediating them. Attorneys with civil experience are better equipped to remove legal barriers that exacerbate the effects of criminal charges in areas such as collections, evictions, public benefits, and domestic violence. These attorneys also have a more rounded view of the legal life of the indigent, beyond their alleged crimes, and they can provide direct legal advice and informed referrals to places like Legal Aid, mental health experts, and others.
To best represent the client, we must also understand the client and his or her community. Therefore, we will require that our attorneys spend time in the communities they serve, where they can provide public legal education clinics, attend and organize forums on our activities and those of other stakeholder groups, and make our office available to hear community concerns.
From modest beginnings come great things. By leveraging our existing community resources, Kalamazoo Defender's model will go a long way in building an institution that delivers a new hope to the hopeless, and through that effort play an important role in the transformation of our community.
