Letter from the Board Chair

Jim Prendergast’s Remarks for VLP Annual Report

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

In its few brief pages, VLP’s Annual Report each year attempts to capture and describe the good works and deep commitment of its staff and panel of volunteer attorneys who work to bring legal services to some of our community’s most vulnerable members.  From these pages, we hope that each of you comes to appreciate the dedication, creativity, and empathy of these legal professionals who are trying to elevate the condition of those in need.  They do it not for compensation or recognition.  They do it because it needs to be done.  Without their contributions of time and skill, someone is going to lose a family home, someone with a disability is going to be without income, or someone will be unable to provide for sons or daughters because of a lost job.  When you consider these pages, be proud to belong to profession that produces such concern and selflessness.  But, the need for legal services among the poor is relentless.  It grows and changes.  For every person helped out of a vulnerable population, another falls in.  Today, the challenge may be home preservation; tomorrow it may be health care.   VLP will be there, but will you?  We can applaud our colleagues who have served and admire their spirit, but we must not assume that others like them will always be there to step up and assume the burden.  VLP needs each of you – our community needs each of you – to find a way to help.  Whether you volunteer your own legal services, support others who make that contribution, or simply let your voice be heard when legal services for the poor are imperiled by indifference or by the clamor of competing public and private priorities, please do not forget the stories and faces of renewed hope, professional commitment, and equal justice that you find in the pages that follow.