"As the Director of Intake at Pine Tree Legal Assistance, I often get asked when the slow and busy times of year are for us. The answer is easy: It’s always busy.
Every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday our team of hardworking, knowledgeable paralegals are on the phones answering around 10,000 calls annually from people in Maine with legal issues.
Right now, approximately 40% of the calls we receive are from people who are facing eviction. The other 60% are a combination of questions from public benefits and consumer issues to less frequent but no less compelling legal questions, like a parent looking for information about their nonbinary child’s name change petition, a 65 year-old woman who fell for an online scam and lost $10,000, and a person who had all of their belongings mistakenly sold by a storage unit company.
Our call-in hours are vital to Pine Tree’s mission of expanding access to justice because we address the urgent questions our callers are asking. There are many wonderful grants that help us address specific issues in specific areas of the law. Your support allows us to bridge the gaps between grants, to help people with the legal issues affecting them even if it is a less common issue that doesn’t fall cleanly in a box. With your support, we are able to address the issues that are most important and pressing to our callers. This is crucial not only to Pine Tree’s work but also to justice in Maine. Justice can’t be available only at certain times for certain issues. For justice to truly exist, it must be ever-present. Your support of Pine Tree allows us to use grants to provide high quality, effective legal assistance and fight for justice more broadly.
There is still more work to be done. We are forced tell people no every day because of our staff capacity. Our paralegal team would say that informing someone in crisis that we cannot assist them is the hardest part of working in legal aid. For the cases we closed in 2023, we were only able to provide advice and brief assistance in 55%. We will continue to work to address the legal needs of people in Maine and also to fight the justice gap by expanding the reach of our services.
We are grateful to have your support as we continue this fight. We could not do it without you."
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