by Kathy Para
JBA Pro Bono Committee Chair
Where would you go to get something translated into Hindi, Punjabi, or Tagalog? How about more widely spoken languages such as French or Russian? This was the dilemma faced by the Fair Housing Advocacy Center (FHAC) of Jacksonville Area Legal Aid (JALA); a dilemma recently solved by students and alumni of Florida Coastal School of Law (FCSL).
With a staff of expert attorneys poised to help low-income clients battle housing discrimination, and a telephone translation service ready for one-on-one consultations with foreign-speaking persons, FHAC lacked one crucial link. It needed to find some way to let people know — in their native tongue — that legal help is available for victims of housing discrimination. With a growing immigrant population in Jacksonville, this meant too many people were not being informed and served.
“Many times, it is the foreign-speaking, low-income client who is most in need of our help,” said David Cronin, lead attorney for FHAC. “We do many community outreach events, but if our information is not in a language that people understand, those people simply are not receiving our message.”
Cronin and JALA turned to Florida Coastal School of Law for help.
“This was the perfect collaboration with Florida Coastal,” Cronin said. “Working with the school’s Director of Pro Bono Services, Karen Millard, we were able to recruit many multilingual students and alumni attorneys in the Northeast Florida area. We issued a request for help and in no time the FCSL community provided us with exactly what we needed — translators and proofreaders proficient in many different languages.”
The effort was so successful that FHAC will soon have information brochures in French, Russian, Korean, Tagalog, Hindi, and Punjabi to add to the existing ones written in English and Spanish. For the staff of the Fair Housing Advocacy Center, it means that they will be able to provide information and assistance to the under served, non-English speaking, low-income residents of Northeast Florida.
For more information about the “Fair Housing – Get the Word Out” project or to volunteer to translate or proofread brochures, contact Kathy Para, JALA Pro Bono Development Coordinator, 356-8371, ext. 363, [email protected].