When you give a gift to support Legal Aid in Western Minnesota ( WMLS), you are helping to:
* Prevent homelessness
* Keep children in school
* Secure resources for basic needs
* Improve substandard housing
* Provide equal opportunies for people with disabilities at home, at work,
and at shcool
* Protect consumers
* Aid vicitms of domestic violence/sexual assault to have safer lives
* Fight housing discrimination
* Help immigrants find better lives

One Story:
In 2005, a Violence Against Women Act grant was awarded to Legal Aid, shelters, and other support organizations, to establish and strengthen a collaboration among legal aid programs and domestic violence/sexual assault victim advocacy groups. This collaboration is meant to provide cordinated seamless services
to women and children who are in desperate need of safety and stability, and includes outreach and assistance to immigrant women.

Western Minnesota Legal Services is part of this collaboration, offering hope to end the cycle of violence for so many women and their children. That hope is realized through the coordinated work of attorneys and many others.
One Story:
A young woman was referred to Western Minnesota Legal Services in Willmar by a judge. The woman was frantic; her husband had taken their children and fled to Texas. Her husband told her that he had more right to the children than she did, as she was undocumented, and that if she came to get them, he would turn her over to the immigration authorities. Instead, what happened was that a WMLS attorney went to court seeking an Order for Protection for the woman. In the course of the woman's testimony, the judge heard about her long history of abuse at the hands of her husband, and about her husband's lack of care for his children. Her husband, testifying by phone, argued that he should get his children because his wife was undocumented. The judge assessed the allegations of abuse, and ordered that the children be returned to their mother in Minnesota. But even with the order, the young woman was too afraid of being turned over to immigration by her husband to retreive her children; her elderly father traveled to Texas to bring them home.
Staff at WMLS then represented the woman in her immigration case. She did not lose her children to her abuser, and she did become a contributing member of Minnesota society, because Legal Aid was there to help make these things possible.

Western Minnesota Legal Services advocates for the rights of disadvantaged people in Big Stone, Chippewa, Kandiyohi, La qui Parle, Lincoln, Lyon, Meeker, Renville, Swift, and Yellow Medicine counties.

To learn more about Legal Aid and the people we serve, go to www.midmnlegal.org