About Us
APALRC History
Originally formed as an all-volunteer organization in 1998, the Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center (APALRC) grew out of a collaborative effort by students from D.C. area law schools and attorneys associated with the Asian Pacific American Bar Association (APABA) and the South Asian Bar Association (SABA). APALRC was founded in response to the lack of linguistically and culturally appropriate legal services for the growing number of Asian Pacific Americans in the D.C. metropolitan region. Since its founding, APALRC has flourished from an all-volunteer organization to an organization with 15 board members, 10 full-time staff, 30 bilingual law student volunteers, and over 70 trained/qualified legal interpreters, who collectively speak more than 25 different Asian languages and dialects.
Since 1998, APALRC has launched and developed several direct service projects, including a multilingual legal helpline and legal interpreter project, Crime Victims Assistance Partnership (CVAP) project, Housing and Community Justice Project, and a legal assistance for Asian American victims of domestic violence project. In 2002, APALRC expanded into civil rights advocacy with its involvement on the issue of language access and was instrumental in the passage of the 2004 D.C. Language Access Act– considered the most comprehensive language access law in the country – which requires that government services be accessible to those with limited English skills.