Brooklyn Legal Services, Corporation A - SSI/Disability Advocacy Project
The Disability Adovcacy Project was originally started as a pilot project in 1983 with funding from the City & State with the focus of representing individuals who receive public assistance and who have been denied SSI disability benefits so that if successful, those individuals would no longer receive public assistance but SSI instead, thus saving the City & State thousands of dollars. Due to the overwhelming success of the pilot project, the funding was expanded first Citywide then Statewide. The success of this project not only benefited the legal services community with the specialty grand funding of DAP funds but it also heped pave the way for other specialty grant funding to fund such things as housing, AIDS and family law advocacy, to name a few. Today, most of the funding that Brooklyn Legal Services receives is specialty grand funding. The DAP unit at Brooklyn Legal Services currently wins over 93% of the cases that we take for representation at the hearing level. However, we're still shooting for 100%.
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