Our Commitment to Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

In 2020, we launched our initiative to promote and embrace justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) which has become fundamental to how we work with each other and our clients. After months of work, our JEDI committee created the following statement which was affirmed by our full staff in 2021 and adopted by our board in early 2022.

Community Legal Aid SoCal is a welcoming, hopeful, anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-oppressive environment where everyone – clients, volunteers, and staff alike with the full array of diverse characteristics, backgrounds, and experiences – feels listened to, deeply cared for, valued, supported, and celebrated so we may be unified, responsive, and powerful in our work together to advance equity, sense of belonging, humanity, justice, and joy.

How We Do This

  • Foster a shared awareness and understanding of the historic and structural contexts of racism, discrimination, and otherism to inform our justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion work.

  • Deeply root our commitment to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in every facet of our organization, beginning with our guiding policies, procedures, and processes.

  • Be intentional in the cases we select and impact advocacy we pursue to achieve the greatest impact in the advancement of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion for our clients and in our community.

  • Embrace our justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion work as a life-long journey where we set concrete goals that we hold ourselves and one another accountable to.

  • Along this journey, we will honor a learning mind, be thoughtful with the language we use, seek to understand and learn from/about one another, listen more and judge less, watch out for micro-aggressions, encourage courageous conversations, give ourselves and others grace and understanding, practice humility, and celebrate all differences as diversity.


We honor that our offices are located on Tongva land and we are committed to upholding equal access to justice for our community members who currently reside on this land.