April 25, 2023

Community Legal Aid Announces New Medical-Legal Partnerships in Franklin County

BY Jennifer Dieringer, Managing Attorney / (413) 686-9013 / jdieringer@cla-ma.org

Community Legal Aid, a non-profit organization that provides free legal services to low-income and elderly residents of Central and Western Massachusetts, is pleased to announce two new medical-legal partnerships with Baystate Franklin Medical Center and Community Health Center of Franklin County. These partnerships will help provide free civil (non-criminal) legal services for low-income residents of Franklin County and the North Quabbin region.

The partnership at Baystate Franklin Medical Center serves to enhance the EMPOWER + (Engaging Mothers for Positive Outcomes with Early Referrals) Family Clinic, which is a comprehensive, community-based screening and referral program serving pregnant women with substance use disorder (SUD), including opioid use. The EMPOWER + Family Clinic is based out of The Birthplace at Baystate Franklin Medical Center/Pioneer Women’s Health in Greenfield. 

The partnership at Community Health Center of Franklin County serves to enhance the Health Center’s two locations (Orange and Greenfield). The Health Center is a Federally Qualified Health Center whose mission is to care for the health of the community, regardless of insurance status or income.

Community Legal Aid holds office hours at Greenfield Family Medicine in Greenfield (part of Baystate Franklin Medical Center) and anticipates doing so at the Health Center’s Orange location beginning in early summer. This regular on-site presence will enable patients and providers to access legal services in a safe, patient-friendly environment. Both partnerships also allow medical providers and staff to directly refer patients to Community Legal Aid.

A Medical-Legal Partnership (MLP) is an innovative collaboration between the medical and legal communities designed to address people’s health-harming legal needs. In the MLP model, the MLP legal advocate trains medical providers to spot situations where a patient’s medical needs may be addressed by legal advocacy. Those medical providers then refer the patient to an MLP attorney, who identifies the patient’s health-harming legal problems and then works to resolve them. Community Legal Aid’s MLP attorneys are also assisted by other in-house legal advocates so that Community Legal Aid can provide these clients with the full array of our legal expertise. 

Examples of health harming legal problems can include the risk of eviction or homelessness, difficulty accessing public benefits and other income stabilization resources, or physical violence in the home. 

With funding from public and private sources, Community Legal Aid has expanded the number of its MLPs from two to seven in the past year. Community Legal Aid launched a MLP with Commonwealth Care Alliance in Springfield last year. In addition, in the last several months, Community Legal Aid has launched new MLPs at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Worcester and Community Healthlink, a branch of UMass Memorial Health Care in Worcester. Community Legal Aid has operated MLPs with UMass Memorial Health Care in Worcester since 2015 and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Leeds since 2018. 

Community Legal Aid’s Medical-Legal Partnerships receive funding from: Albert W. Rice Charitable Foundation (Bank of America, N.A., Trustee), Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation (American Rescue Plan Act funds), Baystate Franklin Medical Center, Commonwealth Care Alliance, Greenfield Savings Bank, UMass Memorial Health Care, and United Way of the Franklin & Hampshire Region.

About Community Legal Aid:

Community Legal Aid provides free civil legal services to the low-income and elderly residents of the five counties of Western and Central Massachusetts (Berkshire, Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, and Worcester), and maintains offices in Worcester, Fitchburg, Springfield, Northampton, and Pittsfield. Community Legal Aid works to assure fairness for all in the justice system, protecting homes, livelihoods, health and families. For more information, please visit www.communitylegal.org.