Western Center advances and enforces the rights of low-income Californians to the basic necessities of life.

Through education, negotiation and litigation, WCLP works to ensure fairness and access to justice for low-income individuals. We devote our resources to effectuating broad-based change aimed at breaking the cycle of poverty, focusing primarily in the areas of health care, affordable housing and public assistance programs. Leaving the representation of individual clients on individual cases to neighborhood legal aid offices, we take the lead on advocacy designed to make large scale improvements in the way low-income Californians receive the most critical services and benefits. Our successful court cases, legislative work and administrative advocacy help hundreds and often thousands of people at a time.

WCLP opened its doors in 1967 in the midst of the nation's "War on Poverty." While policymakers were committed to providing minimum access for low-income individuals to the justice system, WCLP vowed to take it one step further: we would work to ensure that low-income Californians had access to legal assistance that was not merely adequate but the highest quality available for their most pressing legal problems. They should have not just a forum for presenting their grievances, but also the ability to present them effectively before every institution that shaped their lives.

Fulfilling that promise, WCLP has won cases before the highest courts in the land. Many of our successful cases have become landmarks for poverty lawyers throughout the country - requiring government agencies to follow the law in implementing affordable housing, health care and public benefits programs that mean the difference between destitution and hope, homelessness and shelter, sickness or death and health for children, the disabled and the impoverished. In 1972, WCLP opened one of the first legislative advocacy offices in the country dedicated exclusively to representing the interests of low-income people before the legislature, so that our hard-won legal victories would not be undone by back-room political deals.

As California's oldest and largest legal services support center, WCLP has aided a generation of neighborhood legal aid attorneys in their professional development and in the day-to-day representation of their clients - through expert advice, training, task force meetings, legal updates, legislative monitoring and the publishing of specialized poverty law manuals and other educational materials.

Our mission has never been more important. With support for poverty advocacy crumbling nationwide, forceful representation of the interests of low-income people is crucial to ensuring protection of the statutory and constitutional rights of our most vulnerable citizens.

In 1996, Congress cut off federal financial support for programs like Western Center. Since then, WCLP has been supported by private donations, foundation grants, contracts for services, and attorney fee awards.