Expanding Access to Justice with Social Impact Financing

By: Navjeet Bal, Anna Fogel, Storey Dyer Kloman and Shivan Sarin. Published by: Social Finance. Published in April 2014

This article analyzes the feasibility of using social impact financing to fund civil legal aid.

Highlights include:

“While PFS strategies have not been applied in the civil legal aid context to date, they have mobilized public and private resources to scale services in other areas, such as supporting low-income mothers to achieve healthy births, upskilling low-income individuals to get good jobs to move up the economic ladder, and helping people leaving prison reintegrate into their communities.
This project identified contexts in which Pay for Success could be applied to support civil legal aid and where there are gaps in the legal aid field. Through our assessment, we found that civil legal aid is aligned with Pay for Success on a number of dimensions: providers acutely understand the target population for their interventions; providers understand the demand and opportunity to scale; and they are integrated within their communities and address critical policy priorities. However, there are areas where the civil legal aid field is still evolving: there is a growing focus on gathering data on outcomes to demonstrate the long-term impact of interventions and to develop rigorous evaluations of these interventions, as well as assessing the value of civil legal aid in terms of the costs of the program and benefits it generates. In this report, we highlight an issue area –eviction defense –and a delivery channel –medical-legal partnerships –as well as specific providers, all of which were selected because of their focus on many of the PFS criteria listed above.” (p. 2)