Like many rural areas, Coos County has a shortage of lawyers. Now, a new grant awarded to 603 Legal Aid aims to expand legal services in the region, by training volunteers to help people navigate public benefits and other needs.
The volunteers could be librarians and shelter advocates, and they might help people sign up for food assistance or Medicaid. They could connect people to lawyers for family problems, like custody cases, and housing issues. The focus is to train people who are already working in the community to help meet people in need of legal services where they are.
“Anyone who on a daily basis is already talking to the same people that we're looking to serve and that we can maximize their involvement with those folks by basically creating a better pipeline to legal aid,” said Ariel Clemmer, executive director of 603 Legal Aid.
She said the $424,686 grant will fund a pilot program that won't replace lawyers, but will help to train community members in providing limited on-the-spot assistance, with attorney supervision as needed.
The grant comes from the Legal Services Corporation’s Pro Bono Innovation Fund, which has provided grants to more than 100 programs nationwide and is is funded by Congress. 603 Legal Aid was part of a group of 20 organizations across the country that received more than $4.15 million in total grants.
Ronald Flagg, president of the Legal Services Corporation, said that people often don’t realize they need legal help.
“What we see across the country is that in rural areas there are people with civil legal needs with public benefits or family issues or housing, and few — if any — lawyers to serve them,” Flagg said. “That's why there's a focus in part on rural areas for this sort of initiative, not exclusively.”
Flagg said volunteers in these scenarios act a lot like a nurse practitioner or a physician's assistant.
“Just as healthcare has developed different levels of providers to meet different needs, the justice system can develop a broader range of trained professionals who help people resolve legal problems,” he said.
People who earn 125% of the federal poverty level or lower quality for assistance in the program.
Clemmer said they are looking to start training volunteers in 2027 and hope to have them working in the field by 2028. Clemmer said the idea is to have the volunteers build trust with people in the communities they’re already a part of. They’re specifically looking to have volunteers assist people in accessing public benefits.
“They impact the most fundamental aspects of people's lives like food, health care, financial stability,” Clemmer said. “The applications themselves and the eligibility requirements are complicated and they're changing. And so people might struggle in these specific kinds of cases and might take missteps that we hope we could head off by having this kind of assistance upfront.”
The concept that 603 Legal Aid is using comes from Frontline Justice, which is working with 15 other programs across the country to implement the community volunteer model.
Clemmer said the organization chose to launch this initiation after a 2025 study found there were only eight practicing lawyers in Coos County. The study also found that many residents face transportation issues in getting to a court house, legal aid office or other community resources.
Alaska has also initiated a community justice worker program. Like Coos County, people in that state’s rural areas have limited access to transportation to courts and legal aid offices. In 2025, the American Bar Association reported over $23 million in food assistance for Alaskan families, children and older adults, through the Alaska Community Justice Worker Program.
Clemmer said they’re still assessing legal needs, gathering community input and looking for partner organizations that would find their employees as a good fit for participation in the program.
