The following organizations participated with NLADA in the Collaboration Planning and are involved in one or more of the initiatives that are currently underway or in development:

American Bar Association
The American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defendants (SCLAID), through its Bar Information Program (BIP), offers on-site technical assistance and other services to assist in the establishment and improvement of effective state indigent defense systems.

Brennan Center
New York University

The Brennan Center Criminal Justice Program focuses on community engagement and social participation, working to find new ways for the least powerful in our society to have a voice in how we conceive of crime, our law enforcement practices, and the sanctions that we impose. The flagship project of the Criminal Justice Program is the Community Justice Institute. The Institute will encourage the development of partnerships between communities and their local indigent defense service providers so that they might jointly identify mutual concerns and aspirations.

Executive Session on Public Defense (ESPD),
Kennedy School of Government Harvard Law School

An Executive Session is a series of meetings where practitioners, academics, and other professionals gather twice a year for three days to debate and think creatively about a problem or series of problems in a particular field. The goal of ESPD has been to rethink indigent defense in an effort to improve services and support for the field. The twenty-nine members of ESPD included public defender and assigned counsel leaders, scholars, criminal justice experts along with an elected official, prosecutor social worker and journalist.

National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) is a professional bar association whose 10,500 members include private criminal defense lawyers, public defenders, judges, active U.S. Military defense counsel and law professors committed to preserving fairness within America's criminal justice system. NACDL's efforts to improve the quality of representation for poor defendants are spearheaded by a volunteer Indigent Defense Committee and a staff Indigent Defense Counsel, and include systemic litigation, national and state lobbying, training programs for public defenders and assigned counsel, media outreach, and cooperation with local defense bars to promote reform of under funded or otherwise inadequate systems. NACDL also has a full-time Death Penalty Resource Counsel who collaborates on many of these projects as they relate to capital cases.

The Spangenberg Group
The Spangenberg Group is a nationally recognized research and consulting firm specializing in improving justice programs. Created in July 1985 and located in West Newton, Massachusetts, The Spangenberg Group has conducted research and provided technical assistance to justice organizations in every state in the nation. The Spangenberg Group has conducted nationwide research projects on a variety of topics relating to indigent defense services, including, among many other projects, comprehensive assessments of individual state s existing indigent defense systems.

Vera Institute for Justice
Working in collaboration with government, the Vera Institute of Justice designs and implements innovative programs that encourage just practices in public services and improve the quality of urban life. The National Defender Leadership Project (NDLP) provided training and fostered discussion among managers of organizations that represent people who cannot afford to retain private counsel. Through Executive Seminars held in 1998 2000, publications, and the soon-to-be-launched NDLP curriculum on the Vera Web site, NDLP aims to help defender managers realize their leadership potential by engaging stakeholders inside and outside the system on issues of justice policy and strategy.