SPILF Grants have been discontinued.
The 2012 application is now available! We look forward to reviewing your submission.Please complete this application and email it to opg.spilf@gmail.com. If you cannot email, you can mail it to: Stanford Public Interest Law Foundation; Attn: Charlie Wysong; Crown Quadrangle; Stanford Law School; Stanford, CA 94305. Please note that we have a preference for email. All applications must be received by April 1st, 2012. All recipients will be notified and funds will be distributed by June 2012.custom1″>announced!
The Application is divided into three parts. There is a Cover Sheet for you to provide us with basic information about your request. The Proposal Summary offers you the opportunity to write a public description of your work and to briefly summarize why you are seeking support. Finally, the questions focus on the changes that your organization hopes to make in the community (Outcomes), the steps that you plan to undertake to make those changes (Activities), how you will evaluate whether you are succeeding (Indicators), and the capabilities and strengths your organization (Organization). We look forward to your proposal.
Past Projects – Outside Project Grants
The Stanford Public Interest Law Foundation previously funded law-related projects which involved community education, community organization, legal advocacy, or the provision of direct legal assistance. We focused on projects that integrated legal work with broad-based organizing strategies aimed at fundamental social change and directed toward one or more of the following objectives:
- Representing groups traditionally underrepresented by the legal profession;
- Altering the underlying causes of injustice, poverty, and disenfranchisement;
- Creating a society free from racism, sexism, heterosexism, and economic exploitation and supporting the rights of disabled people, immigrants and refugees, lesbians and gay men, people of color, women, workers, youth and the elderly;
- Promoting public health and environmental quality by working to change the root causes of environmental degradation.
Past Examples
2012 SPILF Grants included:
- The Chicago Law and Education Foundation’s “Expanding Legal Services in Chicago Public Schools” project expands school-based legal services programs to 15,000 families in 30 public schools located in low-income Chicago communities across the city.
- East Palo Alto Youth Court is a youth led courtroom. Youths are trained to serve as the advocates, jurors, bailiffs, and clerks. East Palo Alto Youth Court provides positive peer influence to help young offenders make positive future decisions. Building on their recent successes, the organization is expanding its program to include second-time offenders and to further involve youth in the peer influence aspects of the work.
- Justice at Work uses small claims courts as an effective tool to combat “wage theft” by representing immigrant workers, training workers and worker center staff on the process, and educating court personnel to ensure access to justice.
2011 SPILF Grants included:
- Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights (CAIR) Coalition: CAIR Coalition’s Immigrant Detainee Mental Health Project works to safeguard the due process rights of immigration detainees with mental health issues through direct representation, advocacy and training.
- East Palo Alto Youth Court: is a youth led courtroom. Youth are trained to serve as the advocates, jurors, bailiffs, and clerks. East Palo Alto Youth Court provides positive peer influence to help young offenders make positive future decisions.
- Louisiana Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (LCADP): The LCADP‟s Inclusion Initiative campaign will increase both the pool of eligible jurors of color and the number of jurors of color who serve on capital juries in Louisiana through jury education workshops and the grassroots mobilization of African American communities in “death-prone” parishes.
2010 SPILF Grants included:
- Eviction Defense Network, Los Angeles, California.
- Public Interest Clearinghouse, San Francisco, California.
- Immigrant Legal Center of Boulder County Boulder, Colorado.
2009 SPILF Grants included:
- $10,000 to Learning Rights Law Center. Los Angeles, California.
- $6,000 to Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto. East Palo Alto, California.
2008 SPILF Grants included:
- Centro de Los Derechos del Migrante. Zacatecas, Mexico. Our grant will help protect migrant workers’ rights by funding an education program in Mexico on workplace abuses in the United States.
- Farmers’ Legal Action Group. Saint Paul, Minnesota. Our grant will support a campaign to provide legal assistance, education, and representation for African American farmers in the South, whose numbers are diminishing quickly in the face of injustice, poverty, and discrimination. Stanford Law alum Jim Massey founded Farmers’ Legal Action Group and staff attorney Stephen Carpenter has been at the organization since his graduation from Stanford Law School in 1993.
- Louisiana Justice Coalition. New Orleans, Louisiana. Our grant will support the Client Expungement Initiative, a collaborative service with Orleans Public Defenders, to expunge misdemeanor/felony arrests and convictions from the records of indigent clients in Orleans Parish. Jordan McEntyre, a 2007 graduate of Stanford Law School, is a public defender who will collaborate with the Louisiana Justice Coalition on this project.
- National Center for Youth Law. Oakland, California. Our grant will support the National Center for Youth Law’s litigation, Clark K. v. Willden, which seeks to reform Nevada’s foster care system. Abused and neglected children in Clark County, Nevada are dying and suffering other grievous harms while in the custody of a foster care system that is supposed to protect them. Staff attorneys Bryn Leland Martyna and Molly Dunn are graduates of Stanford Law School. This year, Jesse Hanhel ’08 joined the National Center for Youth Law as a Skadden Fellow.
- Resurrection After Exoneration. New Orleans, Louisiana. Our grant will support the first exoneree-run re-entry program in the country in its effort to help Louisiana’s struggling exonerees.
- Transgender Law Center. San Francisco, California. Our grant will assist a state-wide effort to address discrimination and barriers to health care access for transgender people through advice and counsel, direct representation, community organizing, employer advocacy, and state-level health advocacy.
2006 SPILF Grants included:
- $10,000 to Innocence Project New Orleans: Salvaging Hope
- $5,000 Eviction Defense Collaborative
- $7,500 Idaho Legal Services
- $10,000 Legal Aid Society – Employment Law Center
- $3,000 AIDS Services of Austin
2005 SPILF Grants included:
- $10,000 to Centro de los Derechos del Migrante
- $8,000 to Legal Services for Prisoners with Children
- $6,250 to Fresh Lifelines for Youth
- $6,250 to Georgia Justice Project
- $5,000 Western Law Center for Disability Rights
2004 SPILF Grants included:
- $8,000 to A Fighting Chance for the Maxine Walker Initiative.
- $7,500 to Florida Legal Services, Inc. in Gainesville, FL, for the Florida Civil Commitment Case.
- $4,180 to the International Institute of the East Bay, for its Legal Assistance to Immigrant Survivors of Domestic Violence Program.
- $7,000 to the Sacramento Child Advocates, for its Emancipation Initiative.
- $3,500 to Texas Rio Grande Legal Aide, for its Bi-national Project on Family Violence.
2003 SPILF Grants included:
- $8,000 to Oklahoma Indian Legal Services in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, for its Child Advocacy Project.
- $8,000 to Client Centered Legal Services of Southwest Virginia for its KinCare Law Project.
- $5,000 to Fresh Lifelines for Youth in Milpitas, CA for its Legal Eagles Programs.
- $1,000 to Centro Mexicano.
- $5,000 to Innocence Project New Orleans for The Mississippi Project.
- $7,500 to Legal Services for Prisoners with Children in San Francisco, CA, for its Battered Women’s Habeas Project.
2002 SPILF Grants included:
- $10,000 to Disabled in Action of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA, for its Disabled Housing Advocacy Project.
- $10,000 to the Innocence Project New Orleans in New Orleans, LA, for the Jesuit Volunteer Corps.
- $10,000 to Florida Legal Services, Inc. in Gainesville, FL, for its Florida Guard Brutality Project.
- $5,000 to the East Palo Alto Community Law Project in East Palo Alto, CA, for its Immigrants’ Rights Program.
- $5,000 to the Legal Aid Society of San Mateo in San Mateo, CA for its Project ACCESS (Access to Critical Care & Emergency Services).
- $5,000 to the International Labor Rights Fund in Washington D.C., for support of the Del Monte Litigation.
2001 SPILF Grants included:
- $10,000 to the Mississippi Workers Center for Human Rights in Greenville, MS, for its Terror on the Plant Floor Campaign
- $10,000 to Jane’s Due Process in Austin, TX, to provide legal services for pregnant teenagers seeking judicial waivers for abortion services pursuant to Texas’ parental notification law
- $10,000 to Innocence Project New Orleans, to provide legal services to prisoners with claims of actual innocence based on newly-discovered evidence
- $7,500 to Justice Now (formerly the Women Prisoner’s Justice Project) in Oakland, CA, for the community organizing component of its student law clinic
- $7,500 to the Navajo Nation Bar Association in Window Rock, AZ, for the compilation and publication of a bound set of course review materials for the Navajo Nation Bar Exam
- $5,000 to the Housing Discrimination Project in Holyoke, MA, for its Mortgage Lending Education and Enforcement Program
- $5,000 to the Battered Women’s Legal Advocacy Project in Minneapolis, MN, for its Native American Mentorship and Tribal Justice Project
- $5,000 to the Family Law Center in San Rafael, CA, for its Marin Children’s Legal Advocacy Program
2000 SPILF Grants included:
- $5,000 to the Violence Against Women Act Special Self-Petition Project of Oficina Legal del Pueblo Unido in San Juan, TX – to help undocumented battered women receive protections against deportation
- One-year subscription to LEXIS-NEXIS to the AIDS Housing Advocacy Project of the AIDS Legal Referral Panel in San Francisco, CA
- $10,000 and a one-year subscription to LEXIS-NEXIS to the Women Prisoner’s Justice Project in Oakland, CA, to set up a law school clinical program for students to work with women prisoners.
- $6,000 & a one-year subscription to LEXIS-NEXIS to the Student Empowerment Through Law Program of Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland, CA – to set up a program in which students educate their classmates about their legal rights.
- $9,000 to the Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law of Texas in San Antonio.
- $10,000 to the Finger Lakes Special Education Law Project of Legal Assistance of the Finger Lakes in Geneva, NY – to help provide legal services to children who are entitled to special education programs.
- $5,000 to the Food Stamp Education Campaign of the Arizona Justice Institute in Phoenix, AZ.
1999 SPILF Grants included:
- $5,000 to Contra Costa Senior Legal Services, to help hire an additional staff person for the Elder Abuse Project in Richmond, California.
- $10,000 to the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center: The Mississippi Post-Conviction Counsel Project, to help fund death penalty appeals in Mississippi.
- $2,500 and a one-year LEXIS-NEXIS grant to the Disability Rights Advocates for the Access to Health Care Insurance Project in Oakland, California.
- $ 3,500 to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network to help publish the latest edition of
- “The Survival Guide,” aimed at helping gay, lesbian and bisexual military living under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
- $5,000 to Legal Services of the Blue Ridge, to hire a court liaison for the Blue Ridge Domestic Violence Project in North Carolina.
- A one-year LEXIS-NEXIS grant for the On-Site Legal Clinics of the AIDS Legal Referral Panel of the San Francisco Bay Area.
- $ 4,000 to the East Bay Community Law Center, to help establish a credit union in Berkeley, California.
1998 SPILF Grants included:
- $5,000 to the Worcester Fair Housing Project, to help pay the costs of operating a satellite office to provide fair housing advocacy for the greater Worcester, Massachusetts area.
- $4,850 to the Child Care Law Center, for legal training for parents, developing and translating materials, and outreach expenses in its efforts to increase access to quality child care in Santa Clara County.
- $4,750 to Inner City Intervention, for the Reinvestment Law Project for representation of grassroots neighborhoods in low-income communities of color in obtaining expanding access to credit, the broadcast media, and telecommunication resources.
- $4,000 to the Coalition on Homelessness, to fund staff and training costs, outreach and policy advocacy expenses, and legal assistance expenses in representing homeless people who have had their property rights violated.
- $1,400 to the Southern Alameda County Domestic Violence Law Project, for the translation into Spanish of a video on how to file a TRO for on-site courthouse work.
- $5,400 to the CalWORKs Disability Project, through the Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County, to cover outstanding expenses for the Project’s first year budget and for implementing a statewide hotline. This project was developed by Julia Wilson, a 1998 SLS graduate.
1997 SPILF Grants included:
- $4,500 to the Colonia Property Rights Education and Organization Project, which provides education and legal assistance to low-income property owners in unincorporated areas of Texas.
- $6,000 to the Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County, for a project providing legal assistance and education to teenage mothers.
- $6,000 to the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, to support a program of economic development for low-income women.
1996 SPILF Grants included:
- $4,000 to the Homeless Action Center, Supplemental Security Income Re-application Project, to provide legal advocacy for SSI recipients.
- $5,000 to the Legal Intervention for Family Empowerment (LIFE) Project, which provides family law services to poor and working class families who are homeless, experiencing domestic violence, or who are discriminated against because of the sexual orientation of family members.
- $3,500 to the LaRaza Centro Legal’s San Francisco Restaurant Workers Project, to organize and to provide legal education to low-income immigrant restaurant workers.
- $2,000 to the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund’s Mine Safety Project to protect from retaliation those miners who assert their safety rights.
- $5,000 to the Urban Justice Center in New York City, to provide leadership training and legal support to emerging homeless and formerly homeless organizers.
- $4,000 to the Development and Democracy in the Rio Bravo and El Cenizo Colonias, Texas, to establish an informational foundation for local residents to participate strongly in local government, create a community project, and demand public accountability of officials.
1995 SPILF Grants included:
- $7,000 to the Coconino Legal Aid in Arizona, to educate and train local Native Americans as Tribal Court Advocates in the Hualapai, Havasupai, Kaibab-Paiute, and Yavapai-Apache Courts.
- $3,500 each to AIDS Services of Austin and the Title IX Advocacy Project in Brookline, Massachusetts to provide legal information to poor people with HIV or AIDS on estate planning, the Americans with Disabilities Act, landlord and tenant issues, guardianship, divorce, child custody and visitation, and public benefits.
- $3,500 for The Title IX Advocacy Project, to fund resource materials for middle and high school students facing gender discrimination.
- $2,500 to Legal Services of the Blue Ridge in North Carolina, to organize an annexation petition drive, with the hopes that funds available upon municipal incorporation will provide a community-wide sewage disposal system.
1994 SPILF Grants included:
- $2,500 to the Fred Korematsu Film Project, for a documentary on the life of Fred Korematsu and the legal case he brought against the United States over the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
- $5,000 to the Homeless Advocacy Project, for training disabled persons to advocate for themselves within the social service system.
- $4,000 to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center’s Community Immigrant Lay Advocacy and Naturalization Project, to develop materials for and conduct a training of lay advocates who will assist immigrants in the naturalization process.
- $4,000 to the Dispute Resolution Center of Snohomish County, for mediation training of inmates incarcerated in Washington prisons.
- $1,500 to the Sacramento Child Advocates, for production of a workbook for abused and neglected children who are encountering the court system for the first time.
- $2,000 to Police Watch, to fully fund their small claims court advocacy for victims of police abuse in Los Angeles.
1993 SPILF Grants included:
- $7,000 to the Association of Latino Workers, a group of day laborers in San Francisco which organizes workers to improve wages, job opportunities, and compliance with fair labor practices.
- $2,000 in start up funds to the East Palo Alto (California) AIDS/HIV Legal Assistance Clinic, to establish a source for legal assistance to poor people living with AIDS and HIV.
- $5,000 to UNIDO, in Texas, to provide seed money for a Farmworker Credit Union.
- $1,500 to the Hawaiian Homeland Action Network, in Honolulu, to assist in its efforts to organize Native Hawaiians seeking return of their land base.
- $2,500 to Hermanas Unidas/AYUDA, in Washington, D.C., for a program to develop grassroots Latina leadership.
1992 SPILF Grants included:
- $4,000 to the Centro Bilingue Community Immigration Project in East Palo Alto, California, which uses training and education to enable immigrant families to help each other learn about and use their legal rights in encounters with the INS.
- $3,000 to the Cannery Workers Organizing Project at La Alianza in Watsonville, California, to start La Cooperativa, a program to train workers to research and establish worker cooperatives and to participate effectively in the local economic development planning process.