Imagine living life sick and in a wheelchair. Imagine subsisting on $550 per month from Social Security, plus food stamps and medical coupons, barely enough to pay the rent. Imagine receiving a letter saying that you owe the government thousands of dollars because it “overpaid” you. They are planning to cut your benefits to make up for it. It’s all a mistake, but you can’t get the same bureaucrat on the phone twice and it seems like there is no way to explain to them that that you never received any extra money. If you can’t sort this out soon, you’ll be living on the street. And you’re in this fight all alone.

Like more than 85 percent of low income Washington residents, people like this face legal problems without a lawyer. Every month, the King County Bar Association’s VAPWA (Volunteer Attorneys for Persons with HIV/AIDS) program has to turn away six to eight clients because it lacks enough volun-teer lawyers, paralegals and legal assistants to help them. Even with 250 active volunteer lawyers and 40 to 50 of these lawyers dedicated to helping clients maintain or apply for public assistance, the needs of VAPWA’s medically fragile and mentally ill clients go unmet when it comes to obtaining and keeping government benefits.

As one client said, he wished an advocate could have helped him through the entire process of fighting a denial of benefits because he found himself on his own through an entire administrative proceeding. Even though his life was on the line, he said, “If you want to have employees subpoenaed for a denial hearing you have to find them yourself. Social Security will not help you.”

Helping clients like these receive the public benefits to which they are entitled can take persistence, but not a lot of time. Depending on the agency involved, a single case can take as little as four hours to handle or as much as a few hours a month for as long as 13 months. Social Security overpayment cases, where the government alleges clients have received more benefits than they should have, can be handled by trained paraprofessionals; these cases can linger for 12-18 months, but don’t require work consistently throughout that time. Denials of benefits generally go to an administrative hearing within 30-90 days and can be prepared and litigated in about eight hours.

The investment of time brings the satisfaction of knowing that a client with HIV/AIDS will be able stay on his medications, or that a mentally ill client will not lose her housing and wind up on the streets again. Clients say that many of the public servants they deal with, particularly at DSHS, are caring, helpful people. It’s just that disaster can strike when they run into one of the exceptions. That’s when they need advocates to help them negotiate the system and fight for them if necessary.

In addition to accessing public benefits, KCBA Community Legal Services Director Val Carlson reports that volunteers are also needed to represent tenants in short trials involving evictions and tenants facing denial or termination of public and subsidized housing benefits; in real estate foreclosures, particularly of condos; and in hearings challenging reductions in caregiver hours for in-home assistance to the disabled through the COPES program.