Bring a VAAP Legal Help Clinic to Your Community!
Bring a VAAP Legal Help Clinic to Your Community
Community partners, we hope you’re all staying well. At VAAP, we’ve been working tirelessly to wrap up the incredible caseload our dedicated volunteer network took on at the end of 2024. As we wrap up those cases, we’re also focused on:
Expanding our self-help resource library
Updating volunteer orientation materials and workflow templates
Staying current on changes in immigration law and best practices
With legal standards for asylum unchanged, we’re preparing to resume coordinating I-589 filing clinics for Vermont residents facing or at risk of removal proceedings.
Announcing VAAP’s on-site Legal Help Clinics
This spring, we are mobilizing legal volunteers and interpreter volunteers to come to your communities to deliver on-site direct legal assistance to potential clients you have identified. We’re excited to expand our reach by collaborating with partners to bring legal help clinics to different regions of Vermont. To make these clinics successful, we kindly ask partners with preexisting relationships with potential clients to share the clinic prep workload by coordinating client attendance while VAAP handles volunteer recruitment, training, and post-clinic legal work. Here’s how it works:
Community Partners' Role: Coordinating space and clients
Identify a suitable space that accommodates confidential attorney-client meetings (ideally with closed-door rooms).
Provide internet access (essential) and, if possible, scanning and printing capacity (helpful but not required).
Identify and invite clients, and confirm the number of clients the clinic can serve based on space and coordination capacity.
Prepare clients for the logistics of their legal meeting and ensure they arrive with necessary documents, ideally pre-translated to English.
VAAP’s Role: Coordinating lawyers and interpreter volunteers and legal supervision
Recruit and train legal and interpreter volunteers.
Prefill documentation using information gathered in advanced such as clients’ immigration documents.
Facilitate live or virtual volunteer participation (some volunteers may appear remotely).
Supervise the clinic, secure client signatures, and take carriage of reviewing, finalizing, and filing cases.
At each clinic, we aim to open and close legal representation on the same day while laying the groundwork for future support as we secure more resources (with all the grants we’re determined to apply for and secure this year!). For now, we can offer asylum application filing assistance on USCIS form I-589; immigration court forms assistance and advice; or other related humanitarian legal assistance.
Our first spring asylum help clinic is at Migrant Justice in Burlington. If your community organization would like to host a clinic, as well, please get in touch with us at info@vaapvt.org! Let’s work together to make legal help more accessible throughout Vermont.
