Disaster Resilience Program - Host Organization Grant

The Disaster Resilience Program, supported by Equal Justice Works, aims to provide free civil legal aid to communities affected by disasters in the Midwest. With funding for attorney and summer law student fellows, the program addresses the unique legal needs of low-income families, helping them recover from the impacts of disasters. This initiative not only stabilizes lives but also promotes resilience in communities by ensuring access to essential legal services.

A grant page for individual Fellow applicants can be found here.
Disasters devastate lower-income communities, creating new poverty and further entrenching inequality. In the wake of any disaster, families often need the assistance of a lawyer to overcome barriers to recovery.
The Disaster Resilience Program (DRP) mobilizes lawyers (Attorney Fellows) and law students (Student Fellows) to provide free civil legal aid in disaster-prone areas to ensure vital legal services are accessible, comprehensive, and responsive to the unique needs of individuals, families, and communities so lives can be stabilized and communities rebuilt to be more resilient.
These Fellows will provide free, responsive civil legal aid to communities impacted by disasters in the Midwest. Equal Justice Works, as the nation’s largest facilitator of opportunities in public interest law, will support the Fellows and collaborate with the host legal services organizations (“host organizations”) throughout the implementation of the program.
For the current application, direct legal services target specific communities affected by disasters in one of the following states:  Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, or South Dakota.
Funding
Fellow Support Costs: Up to $62,000 per Fellow/per Year (12 months) is to be used towards Fellow Support Costs which include Fellow Salaries and Fellow Fringe Benefits. Fringe Benefits include FICA, workers’ comp, healthcare, retirement benefits, or other host organization approved benefits (please specify in the budget template). The host organization must comply with its internal salary scale. Where the host organization’s salary scale provides for an annual salary greater than $62,000 for an equivalent full-time staff attorney position, the host organization must supplement the Fellow’s salary payment.
Other Support Costs: the subaward includes additional support costs to cover other allowable, reasonable, and allocable direct program support costs associated with the Fellows’ activities up to $4,400 per Fellow/per Fellowship term.
Summer Law Student Fellow Stipend: Equal Justice Works will provide each host organization a $7,000 stipend to disburse to each summer law student Fellow participating in the program for eight-to-ten weeks during the summer of 2026.