LEGAL RIGHTS CENTER INCORPORATED

The Legal Rights Center (LRC) has provided community-based criminal and juvenile defense services to low-income Hennepin County residents since 1970. Attorneys are teamed with Community Advocates, the latter providing culturally specific assistance to populations who face barriers for trusting the legal process or in making good use of resources available to address the problems that may be bringing them into the system. In seeking to prevent our communities from suffering the consequences of criminalization, the LRC has established an outreach and education program in which our staff is available at several community centers on a weekly basis in addition to making presentations to (primarily) youth and immigrant audiences. By this means, we often find ourselves triaging many types of legal problems for which we help community members access other free legal services.

More recently, we have established a Family & Youth Restorative Services program which -- through multiple projects and referral partners -- uses restorative family conferencing to establish agreements for: juvenile offenders (as a partner to the juvenile unit of the Minneapolis Police Department), family involvement after child protection intervention (as a community partner to Hennepin County), and co-parent child support and custody arrangements (as a partner to the fourth judicial district's pilot: Co-Parent Court).

For the past three school years, we have also partnered with the Minneapolis Public Schools to work alongside the district's social workers in creating restorative opportunity to students recommended for expulsion. This project has shown outstanding success in improving academic and behavioral outcomes, ending the school to school shuffle, and removing obstacles to graduation. Through stimulus funding granted by the Minnesota Office of Justice Programs, an evaluation is being conducted by the Healthy Youth Development Prevention Research Center of the University of Minnesota. Our aim is to establish a national best practice for handling expulsion matters so as to improve upon racial disparities in graduation rates.

All LRC services are provided free of charge. For more information, see: www.legalrightscenter.org.