Washington Lawyer: Banking on Justice with IOLTA

Jeremy Conrad covers DC Bar Foundation grantees in the May/June 2025 issue, including a feature of Children’s Law Center and Chief Legal Officer LaShanda Adams:

IMPROVING CHILDREN’S LIVES
Another longtime DCBF grantee is the Children’s Law Center (CLC), which employs a staff of more than 100 people, including lawyers, social workers, investigators, and other professionals to reach more than 4,400 children and their families each year.
“Our mission is to serve all the children and families in D.C. in the areas of family, health, and education. We focus on healthy housing and behavioral health issues, we make sure that children have appropriate educational services, and we work to strengthen families in whatever way we can to reduce the impact of poverty,” says LaShanda Adams, CLC’s chief legal officer.
For example, through its medical-legal partnerships with Children’s National Health System and other health care providers, CLC works side by side with pediatricians to provide legal assistance that resolves the root causes of a child’s health problem, such as mold that a landlord refuses to remediate.
“We were able to lessen the number of emergency room visits for children with asthma. Across multiple cases, we saw a drop from an average of seven visits per child per year to fewer than one after we successfully resolved their housing conditions,” Adams says.
These efforts have had a positive financial impact on the entire District as well. By lowering emergency hospital visits, CLC saves the city an average of $10,000 per child with asthma per year, and significantly more for higher utilizers, resulting in savings of more than $14 million in Medicaid costs over a three-year period, according to CLC testimony before the D.C. Council in April 2024.