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Children’s Law Center envisions a future for the District of Columbia in which every child has a safe home, a meaningful education and a healthy mind and body. We work toward this vision by providing legal services to at-risk children and their families and using the knowledge we gain from representing our individual clients to advocate for changes in the law and its implementation.
Children’s Law Center’s programs foster hope and create opportunity – focusing on the children who need us most … children in the child welfare system and impoverished children and families with special education and health care problems.
We carry out our mission through the following programs:
Guardian ad litem Program
Children's Law Center attorneys are the voice for DC’s abused and neglected children, fighting to find safe homes and to ensure that children receive the services they need to overcome the trauma that first brought them into the child welfare system.
Family Permanency Project
Children's Law Center provides legal assistance to foster parents, grandparents, and other relatives who wish to adopt or to obtain legal custody or guardianship of children trapped in the DC child welfare system or at risk of entering foster care. Children's Law Center also represents children in complex custody cases where family stability is threatened by domestic violence and high conflict between the parents.
Health Access Project
CLC’s Health Access Project is a medical / legal partnership with Children’s National Medical Center – helping poor children and their families overcome barriers to good health by holding agencies, landlords, and schools accountable for inappropriate school programs and illegal, unhealthy housing conditions.
Systemic Advocacy
Children's Law Center's Systemic Advocacy team draws on our experience representing individual children and families to advocate for laws, policies and programs that improve the lives of neglected children and children with special education and health care needs citywide.
CLC's mission fits perfectly with our "KidsFirst" initiative at McDermott Will & Emery. Our lawyers participate in special education appeals, adoption matters and guardian ad litem work. The commitment and expertise of CLC's staff is extraordinary, and their training and ongoing mentoring are first-rate. This has become one of our broadest and deepest pro bono relationships firm-wide.
-H. Guy Collier
Partner, McDermott Will & Emery LLP
Chair, CLC Board of Directors
