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Some township trustees in Marion County are failing the city’s most vulnerable residents through needless delays, denials, and underused funds. These are the findings of a year-long investigation of the township trustee assistance program by a coalition of service providers, legal advocates, and faith-based organizations.

In “Marion County Township Assistance: Opportunities Seized; Opportunities Missed,” the coalition found a system falling short. The report is co-authored by the Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance, Indiana Legal Services, the IU McKinney Health and Human Rights Clinic, the Homeless Initiative Program of Health NET, and the Housing Justice Task Force of Meridian Street United Methodist Church.

Professor Fran Quigley, J.D. ’87, worked with 3L students Alyson Bray and Meredith Fulton, and alumna Jamie Conrad, J.D. ’24, on the clinic’s contributions to the report. Professor Quigley teaches in the Health and Human Rights Clinic at IU McKinney.

Bray recalled a client the clinic worked with during the spring 2024 semester: a single mother who was living in a shelter for the homeless with her four children. That the mother couldn’t get assistance from her township trustee was confounding to Bray, she said. “After learning about the amount of money they control and the assistance they are supposed to provide, like for the homeless mother I was working with, I knew I wanted to further investigate why such a massive failure was occurring,” Bray said. “If a single mother living in a shelter was unable to obtain assistance, then who are they helping, and why are they gatekeeping? Basically, it made me wonder what they were hiding.”

Studying in the clinic and working on the report led Conrad to believe that housing is the linchpin to a person’s ability to live a successful life. Where you live, and whether you have a place to live, is the “silver bullet” that determines much of a person’s life, she said. “With that in mind, going into eviction court throughout that semester, I better understood the stakes. It’s small claims court; it’s informal, fast, and honestly, relatively easy to evict someone,” Conrad said. “Civil lawyers aren’t typically making arguments for the life-or-death situations of their clients. But our clinic was there every week trying to make arguments that helped our clients stay housed. Housed versus unhoused feels like life or death in many ways. If we were unsuccessful, they often had nowhere else to go. If they did, it usually wasn’t safe or affordable.” Conrad now works as the session attorney for the Indiana Senate Democratic Caucus.

Fulton is hopeful that the report will initiate positive change for the system. “The best-case scenario would probably be each township trustee reassessing the processes that they have in place and figuring out what can be done to improve them,” Fulton said. “This will hopefully involve taking the suggestions we have provided, but it also might include other things that go beyond this report. My hope is that soon the situation will be, regardless of where you live in Marion County, that if the township trustee has the funds to help, they help everyone who walks through the door and qualifies for assistance.”

Professor Quigley said he appreciated the fresh perspectives the students brought to the work. “One of the most valuable contributions our students make to our community comes by them seeing our legal and assistance systems through fresh eyes, and then calling for change,” he said. “This report is a great example of just that: our students saw their clients struggling and being unfairly denied help from trustees, so they first asked why, the thoroughly researched the issues, and then took action to fix the systemic problem.”