Legal
Access to justice shouldn’t depend on your income.
Bread for the City’s Legal Clinic provides advice, brief services, and representation in four main areas to DC residents living with low-incomes:
HOUSING LAW: helping tenants in landlord-tenant and subsidized housing cases.
IMMIGRATION LAW: helping noncitizens in a variety of immigration legal matters, including applications for work permits, green cards, asylum, citizenship, and other humanitarian benefits for victims of domestic violence, child abuse, or violent crime.
FAMILY LAW:
Domestic Violence – helping survivors of domestic violence in Civil Protection Order and family law cases (like custody and divorce).
Child Support/Parentage – helping custodial and noncustodial parents with issues like child support modification or enforcement, reductions in arrears owed, and parentage establishment or disestablishment.
PUBLIC BENEFITS LAW: helping individuals facing problems with getting or keeping public benefits, like TANF, Food Stamps, and Medicaid.
Need help getting connected to free legal assistance? Call (202) 386-7616.
Please leave a message about your legal issue. Our Legal On-Call team will call back within 48 hours to learn about your concerns and connect you to the appropriate legal help.
If you’re having a Landlord-Tenant problem, call (202) 780-2575. Bread for the City attorneys, along with other legal services providers, staff that phone line.
You cannot leave a message when our Legal On-Call line is closed. Instead, call the DC Resource Bridge at 202-933-HELP to be referred to an organization that can help you.
Legal Impact Stats
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Access to justice should not be limited by one’s ability to pay for help. Unfortunately, 86% of low-income households in the United States receive little or no help with civil legal challenges.
With Bread for the City’s help, individuals…
- Receive same-day advice and representation in court during critical stages of child support cases,
- Receive legal services while escaping domestic violence,
- Receive same-day advice and representation when facing eviction or loss of a housing subsidy,
- Overcome barriers in getting a government-issued ID, and
- Organize to achieve legal solutions to effect systemic change on community-identified issues.
Movement Lawyering Practice
The Movement Lawyering Practice leverages the law to support Black and brown people who are organizing for systemic and transformative social change in the D.C. housing context. We believe change is transformative when it:
- Improves the material conditions of people’s lives
- Affirms people’s sense of their power, and
- Increases community power*
As the Movement Lawyering Practice, our role is to provide legal support to groups that are also committed to transformative social change. Here’s our commitment to you:
- We are committed to moving at the speed of trust by taking the time to listen to the ideas of our clients and community actively.
- We are committed to centering and elevating the voices of community members and organizers.
- We are committed to taking direction from community members closest to the issue they are organizing around.
*Thanks to the amazing Movement Law Lab for this framework
Legal Clinic Blog
Bread for the City Legal Client Testifies in Support of Access to Justice Funding
I’m urging the D.C. Council to continue funding free legal services like those Bread for the City provides. Without them, people like me — people who don’t have the resources to hire an attorney — will face the system completely alone. And no one should have to do that.
Tracy Davis Testifies in Support of Protecting DC’s Sanctuary Status
Attorney Tracy Davis testified in support of Sanctuary City status, which Mayor Bowser has proposed to eliminate in her 2026 budget proposal.
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