Peggy Revell
The Rainy River District Community Legal Clinic and Kenora Community Legal Clinic will be amalgamated to form the Northwest Community Legal Clinic effective April 1.
“The clients shouldn’t see any change in service,” noted Trudy McCormick, executive director of the Rainy River District clinic and who will be executive director of the new clinic.
“They shouldn’t see any less service,” she stressed. “The contact locations will stay the same, the office locations, staff.
“If anything, the staffing will only increase at some point.
“The name will change, but the people delivering the service and, hopefully, the quality of the service will stay the same,” McCormick pledged.
As non-profit corporations, the legal clinics are governed by a community board of directors, explained McCormick.
Funding comes from Legal Aid Ontario, which, in turn, is funded by the Ministry of the Attorney General.
McCormick noted the community legal clinics are responsible for services for people who are on a low income, such as disability appeals—not family and criminal law which are handled by the legal aid certificate office.
“There’s been a community legal clinic in Kenora for quite a number of years and one here, as well,” she said, adding movement towards the amalgamation began last spring when the person who was the executive director position for Kenora took a new position with Legal Aid in Thunder Bay—leaving the position at the Kenora clinic vacant.
“And at that point, we started talking, the two clinics, about the possibilities of working together,” McCormick said. “We signed an interim management agreement in the spring, as sort of a trial period, and worked together using that.”
After the two clinics worked together for a few months, a joint planning session was held with the board and staff of both clinics this fall.
“And by the end of the weekend, in our planning session, the commitment was made to go ahead and amalgamate the two organizations as one,” McCormick said.
Clinic membership approved the amalgamation, with the new board to feature representation from both districts.
This move to work together falls in line with the provincial climate right now, McCormick noted, which is emphasizing collaboration, integration, and seeing if “you can leverage increased service with the same amount of dollars.”
Legal aid also has come out with what is called their “value agenda,” she added, where legal aid would match the province’s increase in funding with increased service.
“Legal Aid Ontario, our funder, has been very supportive of our efforts,” McCormick added.
With the trial run and up to this point, McCormick said the combination of the two clinics has gone really well.
“It’s had a learning curve, but one of the best parts of it is that there’s a bigger pool of knowledge and experience to draw from,” she reasoned.
If, for example, a client in Kenora has an issue, expertise is available not just from Kenora’s staff but also from the staff in Fort Frances and Atikokan.
“The other thing is, we’re all very small organizations,” McCormick explained, noting the office in Atikokan has just one full-time and one part-time person.
“It’s broadened our pool of staff so that we can move files around. For example, our landlord tenant hearings are all by phone and we’ve had a staff member here in Fort Frances off on a sick leave.
“The staff person in Kenora has been able to do hearings that otherwise there wouldn’t have been anyone representing clients at because we were just too short-staffed to do it.”
The staff lawyer from Kenora also has been able to do disability hearings in Fort Frances in September, and McCormick herself has been able to travel around the area to provide increased services to communities.
Internally, it has meant a little bit of role shuffling, McCormick admitted.
“For example, right now the person here in Fort Frances who was the office manager has been doing some community legal work, some representation work of clients, and the office manager then in Kenora is taking over the office manager responsibilities for all three office locations,” she said.
“For myself, travel, I’m spending a fair bit of time on the road.
“There hasn’t been a lot of other staffing shifting yet,” she added. “We’re still kind of feeling our way because we’re actually the first clinic in the province to do this.”
One benefit of the change McCormick noted is that for events sponsored by legal aid in Toronto, she can attend on behalf of all the locations.
McCormick encouraged anyone interested in more information on the amalgamation to drop by clinic locations across the district.
She also urged residents to become members of the organization since it helps show Legal Aid Ontario how important the clinic is to the community.
