Facing devastating cuts to legal aid, Foundation turns to lawyers: campaign encourages one-time gifts.

Florida Bar President Scott Hawkins and Florida Bar Foundation President Michele Kane Cummings have issued a joint appeal to lawyers for charitable donations to the Foundation to help minimize funding cuts local legal aid programs will experience in the next three years due to declining revenue from Florida's Interest on Trust Accounts Program.

"Legal aid funding in Florida is headed off a cliff, and Florida's poor are going to pay the price --unless we act," Hawkins and Cummings wrote in an email to all Florida Bar members.

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They are requesting that Bar members contribute to the special "Now" fundraising initiative on The Florida Bar Foundation's website at www.floridabarfoundation.org/now.

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Donations to the "Now" campaign can be made by credit card and paid over time. If each member of The Florida Bar were to contribute $100 a year or more for the next few years until IOTA revenue increases, legal aid funding cuts could be reduced by $9 million annually. The name of the campaign is meant to underscore the urgency of the funding crisis.

According to the Bar Foundation, an 88 percent drop in IOTA revenue since 2008 will require it to cut 71 percent of its legal aid funding by its 201415 grant year. The drop in IOTA revenue results from low bank interest rates since the recession. Historically, the Foundation has provided roughly a third of all legal aid funding in the state.

The Bar Foundation estimates that its funding cuts will cause layoffs of about 120 of the 410 legal aid lawyers at work in 2010. With the growth in Florida's poverty population since the recession, that would leave one legal aid attorney for every 10,700 people living in...