Bloomberg – The city’s legal services gap was clear in September 2022 at a city council hearing. At that point, the Adams administration didn’t have clear answers about who would be running legal services or how they would be administered, said City Council Member Shahana Hanif, who heads the council’s immigration committee.

“It was evident from that first hearing just how much of a necessity it would be to invest in legal services,” Hanif said.

Over the past year, the insufficient funding and planning from the city has left an opening for a patchwork of nonprofits and religious organizations to take on some of this work themselves. But with limited resources, they’ve had to work at a much smaller scale. The Pro Se Plus Project, a legal aid collaboration that includes the New York Legal Assistance Group, UnLocal, and other organizations, has managed to screen approximately 2,000 people and file applications for nearly 500. [Read More]