Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest integrated, nonprofit health care provider, is expanding its innovative Health, Housing, and Justice: Medical-Legal Partnership initiative across seven of its regions. The initiative brings critical housing-related legal services to Kaiser Permanente members and communities, helping prevent evictions to increase housing stability — a critical part of good health and health equity.
This systemwide expansion is supported by a grant to the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership and its partner HealthBegins. The organizations will lead training and technical assistance activities and build legal aid capacity to prevent evictions for up to 10,000 more community residents and help up to 4,500 Kaiser Permanente members, patients, and families access housing-related legal support by 2025.
This investment builds on the medical-legal partnership housing work that began at Kaiser Permanente in 2022. Joel Teitelbaum, co-director of the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership and professor of public health and law at George Washington University, said, “The first 2 years of the program have paved the way to scale the MLP initiative’s tools, resources, and best practices to increase the capacity of legal aid organizations. We look forward to deepening the community impact of the initiative, allowing legal organizations to help even more people in need of legal support.”