Starting this month, they will be. Gillett directs the Michigan Advocacy Program, parent of Legal Services of South Central Michigan. “Legal Aid,” as most locals call it, owns a historic brick building on the corner of Kingsley and Fourth and rents additional space in the City Center Building. In August, it’s leaving both for the long-vacant Smith Furniture building in Ypsilanti. The move will more than double its space to 23,000 square feet; they’ll occupy as much as they need and rent out the rest.

Gillett has headed the nonprofit since 1983. “We started as a legal aid field program,” he says. After a series of mergers, they now serve fifteen counties, with additional offices in Monroe, Jackson, Battle Creek, and Lansing. They’ve also “added a statewide farmworker program and a whole bunch of statewide advocacy programs,” he says, including the Crime Victims Legal Assistance Project, the Michigan Poverty Law Program, and the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center.

The Immigrant Rights Center recently handled a case involving a minor who illegally crossed the southern border and was sent to foster care in Michigan. Recalls Gillett, “The kid is mildly delayed, and he’s riding his bicycle on the freeway and gets stopped by the police and panics–and tried to run away, like a sixteen-year-old who doesn’t speak the language and is afraid of what the police might do.

“They arrest him and put him in detention for deportation back to Guatemala. He’s a mildly mentally retarded sixteen-year-old in an adult deportation facility in Calhoun County, and what kind of [expletive] country does that?”

The same kind that pays Gillett and his crew to get the kid out, is the answer. An immigration specialist arranged to have him bonded out and returned to the foster care facility. “The lawyer sent a picture of him walking out of jail with her yesterday!

“There’s a heartwarming story every day,” says Gillette, a U-M law grad who’s devoted his career to legal aid. More than 12,000 people received help from MAP last year, says attorney Charles Borgsdorf, a longtime board member.

“You get as much justice as you’re able to pay for,” Borgsdorf adds. “Businesses and people with means can be plaintiffs and can defend themselves, but if you don’t have means, you don’t have a lawyer–and you’re almost certain to lose.”

Ellen Rabinowitz, health officer at Washtenaw County Public Health, calls MAP “a tremendous community resource”–and not just for their own clients. “They brought a class action suit against the county because it didn’t provide hospitalization for medically indigent individuals,” she points out. “They won, and the county started funding, and so did other counties. That had a real impact throughout the state.”

MAP also helped start Avalon Housing. Former director Carol McCabe says they’re “hugely important” to Avalon clients, “helping them resolve all sorts of legal matters.”

But the program can’t help everyone. “The Legal Services Corporation says 86 percent of the legal needs of low-income people are unmet,” Gillett says. “We do a lot better, but still the unmet need is 50 percent here.”

The LSC’s federal funding is a favorite conservative target–this year, President Trump wanted to zero it out. Congress increased it instead–“there’s a lot of bipartisan support for legal services,” Gillett says–but MAP is less dependent on the LSC than most legal services groups. Thanks to grants, donations, and generous pro bono support from local law firms, only about a quarter of its budget comes from the feds.

Still, federal rules dictate priorities. “The bulk of our cases are evictions and foreclosures, domestic violence prevention, getting someone on Medicaid, getting someone on Social Security or SSI.” In family law, they prioritize domestic violence cases, but that leaves “a lot of really compelling custody cases and meritorious child support cases that we don’t handle.”

Those needs are greater now in the eastern part of the county. “When we moved into this location in 1977, Kerrytown had just started,” Gillett says. Zingerman’s didn’t exist, and the nearby neighborhood was still primarily African American–the building itself was once the Dunbar Center, providing services to black Ann Arborites. Now, “in terms of client volume, it’s [Ypsilanti’s 481] 97 and 98 zip codes, Ypsilanti Township, and the trailer parks on Michigan Avenue.”

MAP sold its Ann Arbor building to the O’Neal family, who own the Kerrytown Market & Shops next door. It was a “very friendly sale,” Gillett says– Andrew O’Neal was the first person to show them the Ypsi building, and O’Neal Construction is doing the renovation work.

In mid July, they were on track to move by the end of the month. But Gillett will run the new office for just a few months–he’s retiring at year’s end. A new co-executive director, Ann Routt, is already in place, and will take over when he leaves.

Gillett is looking forward to time off but says he still plans to “volunteer or consult” for the agency. “I’m an advocate,” he says.

This article has been edited since it was published in the August 2018 Ann Arbor Observer. The name of the Michigan Advocacy Program has been corrected.