Giving every child a voice
Providing quality advocacy and legal services to low-income children and youth
Since its inception in 1977, the CLCM's comprehensive litigation services, trainings, technical assistance and broader policy work have benefited tens of thousands of disadvantaged children and families across the Commonwealth.
What We Do
Education
CLCM attorneys provide comprehensive legal representation and related litigation assistance to public school students in a range of education matters, including school discipline, homelessness, special education, and challenges to student enrollment, student privacy, and residency. Among those initiatives is a medical-legal partnership between CLCM and MGB-Chelsea Health Center, designed to improve outcomes for child patients by simultaneously addressing health and legal challenges, and a statewide project addressing systemic barriers impacting the right to high quality education for all students.
Through our Immigrant Children’s Justice Project (ICJP), our attorneys represent youth, most victims of trauma in their homelands, in special immigrant juvenile (SIJ), asylum, temporary protected status, UVisa, DACA, and related cases. Consistent with the CLCM’s “holistic advocacy,” our attorneys also provide litigation assistance to these children in several collateral matters such as child custody, education, health care, and insurance.
Civil Legal Aid for Victims of Crime (CLAVC)
The CLAVC initiative was created through the Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation (MLAC) and is designed to provide civil legal help to victims of crime. In legal assistance programs across the Commonwealth such assistance can range from housing and state benefits advocacy to domestic violence and family law. At the CLCM, CLAVC attorneys and a paralegal have been providing scores of victimized children with legal help in education (e.g., bullying), abuse & neglect/child welfare, immigration and related family law matters.
Child Welfare
Child welfare at the CLCM covers legal issues connected to public and private services with a goal to encourage family stability. The work finds CLCM lawyers serving as legal counsel to children in Care & Protection (abuse & neglect) cases, representing youth in Child Requiring Assistance (CRA) matters, and advocating for foster children “aging out” of the Department of Children & Families (DCF) system, among other matters.
Juvenile Justice
Children in Massachusetts are entitled to the full spectrum of rights as adults when charged with a crime. Law Center attorneys provide direct representation for these children, along with appellate advocacy on behalf of juveniles adjudicated delinquents or “youthful offenders.”
Other Legal Representation
Consistent with the CLCM’s dedication to holistic representation for its clients—tending to the legal needs of the “whole child”—agency lawyers also try to provide legal aid to children in areas of the law that do not fall within those primary areas referenced above.