If poverty can sometimes appear as neglect within a family, would better social and legal support help prevent unnecessary child welfare involvement? An Access to Justice Lab ongoing randomized controlled trial aims to find out. This episode gives a research partner’s point of view to the trial.
This is the story of a traditional law school clinic that has evolved into much more. CHAMPS, the Carolina Health Advocacy Medical–Legal Partnership, is a legal service provider embedded in a healthcare setting. It’s also the field partner for an A2J Lab study evaluating whether legal partnerships can reduce downstream involvement by child welfare agencies in cases potentially due to poverty-related conditions.
Conducting randomized control trials in the law can be a decade-long (or longer) process. Our “Child Welfare” project evaluates whether families with children who face poverty-related legal and social challenges can avoid unnecessary entries into the child welfare system with the assistance of holistic legal services – a combination of social worker services and a traditional attorney-client relationship. The study is five years in the making and still just half-way through completion, but we’re sharing its origin and process anyway.
