Our main implementation site and health partner is KKV, a federally-qualified community health center. We also serve families living at the Towers at Kuhio Park (formerly known as Kuhio Park Terrace (KPT)), the state’s largest public housing complex. Our project seeks to improve the health and well-being of low-income children and families by addressing the underlying social determinants of health
, including providing an array of traditional “poverty law” and self-advocacy tools, as well as systemic advocacy across disciplines. The Medical-legal Partnership (MLP) model was developed in 1993 by pediatrician Dr. Barry Zuckerman at the Boston Medical Clinic. Nearly twenty years later, medical-legal partnerships exist in 262 health institutions in 36 states, and there is a National Medical-Legal Partnership Network. The American Bar Association and the American Medical Association passed national resolutions in support of the MLP model and bipartisan legislation has been introduced in Congress to provide MLP funding for a “federal demonstration project.”
What We Do
The Medical-Legal Partnership for Children in Hawai‘i (MLPC) follows the national model of engaging in the following three core activities:
1. Providing direct legal services to low-income clients through Legal Advocacy Clinics on-site at a community health clinic setting;
2. Transforming legal and health practice through professional education and training; and
3. Working together as doctors and lawyers to address systemic advocacy issues, including policy change, community empowerment, and professional training. MLPC Hawai‘i runs twice-weekly, free Legal Advocacy Clinics for low-income families on-site at KKV. We also run Legal Advocacy Clinics at KPT. The Legal Advocacy Clinics coincide with the KKV Pediatrics Clinics every Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. This allows for seamless legal services for families, and it also provides practical training for law students alongside pediatric residents. To date we have assisted over 450 families at KKV and KPT, and reached hundreds more through outreach and workshops. In addition to direct legal services, MLPC Hawai‘i hosts numerous professional trainings and educational workshops each year for health professionals (including doctors, nurses, dentists, behavior health social workers, psychologists, maternal and child health outreach workers, etc.), law students and medical students, and community partners. These educational and outreach efforts are all organized and selected carefully both to train our community partners and to build relationships as key elements of our collaborative, interdisciplinary vision. Lastly, MLPC Hawai‘i engages in systemic advocacy alongside the communities we serve, focusing on advocacy and policy solutions that emerge from the “ground” up. This means listening to the needs of the families we serve, our community partners, fellow professionals, as well as policymakers themselves. For example, MLPC has worked closely with the Micronesian community in Hawai‘i to advocate for their access to health care and to address discrimination, language access, civil rights, and other new immigrant challenges. To learn more, please visit:
- MLPC Hawaiʻi’s website at www.mlpchawaii.org
- KKV’s website at www.kkv.net
- The National Center for Medical-Legal Partnerships at www.medical-legalpartnership.org
