The Foundation.

I have been a member of The Florida Bar since 1978 and dedicated my legal career, and really, my life, to those of us, who for reasons of economic status, race, and gender, did not have ready access to protections of the law.

When I retired from Legal Services of North Florida in 2016 after 38 years, I feared for the future services that would be made available to low-income Floridians in large part because of the massive changes that have been implemented by The Florida Bar Foundation.

Over the course of my tenure, the statewide community developed a dedicated cadre of experienced advocates and a system of coordinated efforts to ensure high-quality representation was available throughout the state. It was not perfect but it produced amazing results. The Foundation played an integral role in building the system and coordinating the efforts. When the longtime executive director and director of grant programs at the The Foundation retired a few years back, new leadership decided massive changes were in order rather than a few tweaks. Reasoning went that because programs were only meeting 20 percent of the need, changes had to be made. Ignore the fact that resources were not available to meet any additional need. And ignore the fact that none of the strategies employed solved that problem, in fact just the opposite. (Current projections indicate 10 percent of the need is being met.)

The Foundation removed transparency and rejected input from executive directors of delivery programs. Once accomplished, they (1) increased funding for pro bono efforts with a resultant reduction in attorneys participating, (2) increased funding for technology that has produced no meaningful results and will never solve the most complicated problems for large portions of the low-income community, (3) increased the population eligible for The Foundation funded services with reduced available revenues, (4) reduced funding for direct services resulting in less available staff with expertise in numerous areas of the law, (5) eliminated funding for coordinating training efforts for less experienced delivery staff replacing it with costly statewide meetings and trainings which programs were mandated to attend without meaningful outcomes or input, (6) more recently, eliminated funding for general support services substituting it instead for programs like student loan repayment assistance and fellowships, (7) hired many consultants in addition to more Foundation staff...