FoMD - SJ CoSS - Edmonton Community Legal Centre

Who was your community partner, and can you describe the project objectives?

Our community partner was the Edmonton Community Legal Centre (ECLC), a community organization that provides free legal advice, coaching, information, or representation to individuals with lower incomes. ECLC assists their clients in the areas of family, civil, and immigration law, as well as in accessing social benefits programs. We worked with ECLC to develop resources for applying for AISH, a program by the Government of Alberta that provides financial and health benefits for eligible Albertans with a permanent medical condition that prevents them from earning a living. Many AISH applicants undergo an excessively long application process due to rejections and appeals before enrolling in the program. The objective of our project was to create AISH application resources to help reduce the number of appeals so that eligible applicants can start receiving AISH benefits in a more timely manner. We created a presentation that ECLC can give to other community organizations, social workers, and clients on AISH applications, as well as a document to help physicians complete the medical report section of the AISH application.

What was the biggest takeaway from your CSL placement?

A big takeaway for us was that good healthcare requires attention to social factors and well-being. Our “comprehensive healthcare” in Canada certainly doesn’t extend to cover social determinants of health, but an integrated team of healthcare providers can work together to help deliver quality care that addresses some of the determinants, and community organizations like ECLC are there to help individuals access and navigate increasingly complex social support systems. We also learned that there are some really awesome lawyers and legal staff out there advocating at the individual and community levels. They often go unnoticed behind the scenes while driving beneficial policy change and holding our governments accountable.

How can you apply any newly gained knowledge/skills to your future endeavors (courses/employment/volunteering)?

We learned that AISH and many social supports are “wicked problems” with no solutions due to complex, ever-changing relationships and stakeholders that have contradictory goals surrounding outcomes. This often results in complex support systems with many barriers to access. Many non-profit groups, community organizations, or pro bono work is often required to help individuals access and navigate these supports. In our future endeavors, we will advocate for fewer barriers and to promote support systems for accessing social programs.