We are now accepting your proposals to lead workshops.
NLADA's Annual Conference is the leading national training event of the year for the civil legal aid, indigent defense, and public interest law communities. The conference offers advocates the substantive information and professional skills they need to respond to the legal needs of low-income people, provides unparalleled opportunities to meet and exchange ideas with colleagues from across the country, and helps fulfill continuing legal education requirements.
We invite you to submit a proposal to organize a workshop that brings lessons learned and advanced thought to our shared goal of expanding access to justice and improving service delivery. Your session proposal should describe its topic, its format, and the names of proposed presenters. Proposals are due no later than 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on June 1, 2018. If your proposal is chosen, as session leader you will be responsible for submitting additional workshop information, including a final title, description, and presenter bios by August 31, 2018.
Training Tracks
Workshop presentations may take many forms, but we especially encourage interactive formats that capture the expertise and perspectives of audience members as well as panelists. Workshop proposals should be developed around the following ideas.
Board & Organizational Leadership Workshops
Successful nonprofits are indispensable to their communities' health and well-being. They have credibility with the people they serve and can articulate their values and the value they provide. We invite workshop proposals that showcase and train others on how board members of successful nonprofits:
- act with transparency
- support and clarify the organization's vision
- use their influence and expertise to help staff achieve greater impact
- employ concepts of “design thinking” in practical ways that can be applied to our work
- bring diversity and inclusion to the board as a means to greater effectiveness
- evaluate both their effectiveness as the governing body and the effectiveness of organizational strategy
- put into place succession plans for board members and senior staff
- institute processes for more efficient board meetings and board operations
Proposals for board workshops should focus on the knowledge, vision, leadership skills, and evaluative tools necessary for board members to increase community impact.
Civil Legal Aid Workshops
Civil legal aid covers a remarkably broad range of topics, all of which advance equal justice. To help advocates provide even more effective services during particularly challenging times, proposals for this year's conference may highlight:
- effective models for corporate engagement with legal aid
- using racial equity analysis to inform advocacy and effect change
- community and client engagement and empowerment
- community redevelopment initiatives
- hurricane and other post-disaster recovery efforts, especially related to FEMA and housing issues
- realistic, productive, and fair legal representation for immigrant populations
- human trafficking, labor, and other human rights issues
- diversity, women's rights, and sexual harassment
- using data and new technologies to increase effectiveness
- substantive strategic advocacy sessions and/or measuring their impact
- managing potential reductions in significant sources of funding
- better ways to tell our success stories and showcase our work for equal justice
- resources for civil legal aid and legal aid attorneys
- addressing the impact of student debt on staff, clients, and the delivery of services
- cross-cutting collaborations that provide a continuum of services to clients and communities, including collaborations between civil legal aid and indigent defense programs
- burning issues – new and evolving issues facing our clients, organizations, and communities this year
Events of recent years have created a particular interest in issues that cut across the field of legal aid. We are particularly interested in proposals that address:
- systemic racial injustice in policing, access to courts, court fees, community investment, and more as we reflect on increasingly visible racialized violence and the advocacy and movements emerging in response
- balancing religious, speech, and other core constitutional freedoms with evolving community standards
- economic justice and the “criminalization of poverty"
- mentoring and developing new leadership for the next generation of legal aid advocates
Client Workshops
People who have been served by legal aid organizations contribute to success in their communities through service, advocacy, effective communication, collaboration, and leadership. Proposals for workshops in this category may include client leadership training, effective lay advocacy skills, communications skills training, and examples of the contributions of client leaders in their communities. Every session proposal should include at least one client leader in the development and execution of the session.
Public Defense Workshops
Defenders are champions of justice, employing proven and innovative tactics, tools, and technologies to ensure excellence in client representation and bring attention to the critical importance of quality public defense. We encourage proposals for interactive workshops that provide attendees with checklists, reports, best practices, and other tangible resources that allow attendees to put their learnings into practice. We welcome proposals covering the full range of topics and issues important to defenders, and we are particularly interested in proposals related to:
- community-oriented defense and holistic representation
- interdisciplinary and cross-sector collaborations to improve public defense, including collaborations with civil legal aid programs
- defender participation in policy reform
- municipal and misdemeanor defense
- procedural justice
- early entry of counsel & pretrial/bail reform
- defender-led data collection & research efforts
- innovative funding models for public defense
Resource Development Workshops
Both new and experienced resource development staff look for tools to create, cultivate, and sustain their organizations' fundraising programs. Session proposals can range from the nuts and bolts of resource development work and relationship building to the best social media platforms to reach donors. In the difficult and competitive arena of fundraising, resource development staff must ensure that they have gathered all the “low-hanging fruit,” but they must also engage new strategies that attract competitive, non-traditional, and more diversified funding opportunities.
Joint/Multi Track
Some of our workshops will address topics that are of interest to more than one of the above categories or are generally applicable to many audiences, including communications, risk management, design thinking, and technology. Proposals should indicate all programming areas that apply.
Submit Your Proposal
We are using the Google Forms platform to collect proposals this year. Once you are ready to begin your proposal, click here, complete all the required fields, and provide as much information as you think is necessary for us to effectively review your proposal. When you are done, be sure to scroll to the bottom of the screen and click the “Submit” button. You will receive an automatic confirmation of your submission and will have an opportunities to edit what you submitted and submit another proposal.
Proposals are due no later than 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on June 1, 2018. If your proposal is chosen, as session leader you will be responsible for submitting additional workshop information, including a final title, description, and presenter bios by August 31, 2018.