Law and public health students in Professor Emily Benfer's Health Justice Policy & Advocacy Clinic are learning how health intersects with housing insecurity, food access, healthcare access, and poverty's daily realities. They’re also learning how to engage in complex problem-solving to improve health outcomes for low-income individuals and families in Washington, D.C. and across the country.
Piloted in 2022 and launched in 2023, along with GW Law’s Health Law Program, the HJPA Clinic enrolls law and public health students throughout the academic year. Students take a multi-prong approach to securing health justice, including direct client representation, community-based advocacy and organizing, and federal policy advocacy. The HJPA Clinic partners with a variety of D.C.-based and national organizations, including the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership, C3Cares, primary health care providers and non-profits that help build community power, and focus on public health, housing, and environmental justice.
As the legal arm of a medical-legal partnership, the HJPA Clinic represents individual patients who suffer poor health due to social and legal issues, such as an imminent eviction, dangerous housing or environmental conditions, public benefit denials, among other areas that result in poor health for adults and children, alike. For example, the health care partners referred a patient undergoing chemotherapy who struggled to recover in an apartment with mold and unreliable hot water—in violation of the District’s housing code.
Clinic students also engage in complex problem-solving and advocacy. During one semester, after meeting parents whose children were lead poisoned in federally assisted housing, Professor Benfer’s former students drafted a bipartisan federal bill and educated members of Congress once it was introduced. The students later submitted comments to federal rulemaking to successfully amend the federal definition of lead poisoning in housing programs. Students have spearheaded comments to federal rulemaking for clients and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus invited the HJPA Clinic students to present their research findings on eviction prevention through federal, state and local laws.
The HJPA Clinic also supports historically marginalized and low income communities in the development of strategies that enhance protections in housing and health care access. Clinic students are currently working with EmpowerDC, a community-based group that organizes D.C. tenants to help them shape the decisions that impact their daily lives. Clinic students have helped tenants draft public hearing testimony and comments to upcoming local legislation, and hosted Know Your Rights trainings to support the group’s members in navigating complex housing assistance programs and understand their rights related to the eviction process.
Students commit 20-25 hours weekly to clinic work—more advocacy experience and client contact than most attorneys gain in their first years of practice. Through advocacy projects, client representation, and onsite support in under-resourced D.C. neighborhoods, they develop problem-solving skills alongside interprofessional competence and increased awareness of social, structural, systemic, and political realities. Students learn to listen with empathy and non- judgment, and engage in client-centered counseling.
According to Benfer, students consistently describe the clinic as among their most intense and rewarding academic experiences, describing the experience as “unforgettable” and “life changing.” The Orlove Family provided startup funding for this model where legal education directly serves community needs, while teaching students that effective advocacy requires understanding the lived realities behind legal cases—revealing how law can either create or resolve structural inequities shaping health and housing access in the nation's capital. If the HJPA Clinic students are involved, they will most certainly be striving for the later. As one student explained, “it’s the first opportunity in law school to “step back, look at the realities of the world around you, and take action to make lives better.” HJPA students gain the skills to do just that.