Legal Aid Society moving to catalyze community change: Quo Vadis Cobb and Colleen Cotter

By Quo Vadis Cobb and Colleen Cotter

 CLEVELAND, Ohio -- In late 2023, The Legal Aid Society of Cleveland received an unexpected one-time gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott. Almost immediately, community members began to ask: what are you planning to do with this significant gift?

Our Board and staff leadership took time to evaluate how to best leverage this one-time gift. Legal Aid is a vehicle of change and growth for our community. The question we wrestled with was how can we use this gift to ensure leverage and longevity of the organization’s impact?

The board and leadership team decided to create an organizational fund at the Cleveland Foundation. At the Cleveland Foundation, organizational funds are diligently stewarded. Moreover, we found there was synergy in the community foundation model and how The Legal Aid Society approaches its mission.

Community foundations focus on improving the lives of people within a specific geographical area. They address unique community needs and support local organizations and projects that can have a direct and lasting impact on the community.

For us at Legal Aid, the sustainable, long-term impact of this one-time investment was important: by creating an organizational fund, we can begin to build a sustainable source of funding for Legal Aid’s critical initiatives and impact. We can use the fund for strategic, long-term investments to serve our clients. We can leverage the collaboration, communication, and partnerships among various stakeholders that are fostered by the Cleveland Foundation for their organizational fund partners.

We can also improve the stewardship of this investment by leveraging the expertise of professionals who are well-versed in the areas of grants, investments, reserves, endowments, and taxes, just to name a few. We are confident that Legal Aid’s funds will be well stewarded so they can support our mission in perpetuity.

Community foundations in Legal Aid’s service area –the Cleveland Foundation, Ashtabula Foundation, and Community Foundation of Lorain County– have a long history with Legal Aid and a deep understanding of the local community’s needs and challenges. They can leverage their expertise to identify key issues, allocate resources effectively, and support innovative solutions to address pressing community issues. They also play a vital role in fostering a sense of unity, resilience, and progress within a community by mobilizing resources, driving positive social change, and encouraging cooperation amongst community stakeholders.

In addition to the new Cleveland Foundation fund, we also have a long-established fund at the Community Foundation of Lorain, and the proceeds from these will be used to support Legal Aid’s strategic goals:

• Make systems better for our clients. We will establish the infrastructure for systems change work to achieve long-term equity and justice.;
• Build our skills and capacity to better fulfill our mission. This includes becoming more human-centered, trauma-informed, and responsive to our clients and client communities; establishing an anti-racist practice; and aligning our culture and infrastructure with our core values, impact areas, and strategic goals.;
• Leveraging the resources around us to amplify our impact. We will continue to build reciprocal relationships and partnerships with our clients and client communities to increase impact and deepen reciprocal relationships and partnerships with organizations to increase impact.

These funds ensure that Legal Aid can continue to provide its clients with high-quality civil legal representation at no cost to them. These essential services help people find a way to escape domestic violence, secure a safe and livable place to call home, obtain well-paying and sustainable employment, improve access to education, build generational wealth, and much more.

Quo Vadis Cobb is the president of The Legal Aid Society of Cleveland’s Board of Directors in 2024. Colleen Cotter has served as executive director of Legal Aid since 2005.

Story published on cleveland.com: Legal Aid Society moving to catalyze community change: Quo Vadis Cobb and Colleen Cotter