The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center’s mission is to promote housing justice and stability by ensuring the protection of tenant’s rights through the provision of passionate and committed lawyers at no cost to the tenant.
The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center (DEAC) has changed drastically since its grassroots inception in March 2020. Historically, in the United States, tenants who attend their eviction hearings without an attorney have a 3% chance of winning their case, regardless of the information they present.
By providing pro bono legal defense for tenants facing eviction, we have been able to assist our local neighbors in remaining housed, with a success rate of 97%.
That means our most vulnerable neighbors in our local community are allowed to remain in their homes, tax our local infrastructure and financial systems less, and get back on their feet faster in order to continue to maintain self-sufficiency on their own and for generations to come.
The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center (DEAC) is here to disrupt the system, not triage it. We feel that there is a spectrum of housing insecurity, ranging from those individuals and families facing an immediate, oftentimes short-term threat of housing insecurity or instability, to those individuals and families experiencing long-term homelessness.
The many nonprofits focus on those experiencing long-term homelessness because they are the ones with the most critical, immediate needs. With a myriad of organizations to assist those facing long-term homelessness, we focus on those persons facing immediate threats of housing insecurity and instability. By focusing on situations of immediate, short-term insecurity or instability where people are struggling to make ends meet circumstantially we can help prevent persons from progressing further towards a lifetime of homelessness. Nonprofits do a good job typically of triaging the situations they encounter, but their efforts are diluted by the sheer scale of the problem.
Our intent is to disrupt the system and prove our concept of “saturation theory” (i.e., the concept that by saturating every eviction court in our area, it will force landlords to follow the actual letter of the law and rightfully evict tenants, instead of wrongfully evicting people who have no grounds for being evicted). We intend to disrupt a system that inherently favors landlords while also perpetuating and exacerbating racial/gender/familial gaps. The majority of our clients are living paycheck to paycheck, so even one unexpected expense can upend their entire life. The ongoing eviction crisis exacerbates an already tight budget when someone is being evicted over what usually is one month’s worth of rent.
The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center believes that the pandemic coupled with an affordable housing crisis has created a critical eviction issue and housing displacements of mass proportions, which can be assisted with pro bono legal defense.
The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center’s mission is to promote housing justice and stability by ensuring the protection of tenant’s rights through the provision of passionate and committed lawyers at no cost to the tenant.
DEAC does not accept any government grants and is 100% privately funded specifically so that we can maintain our zero-restriction eligibility structure. Our work is not only helping Dallas tenants, but also showing the rest of the country how effective legal aid organizations could be if their funding mechanisms were reformed. And our work already has been a catalyst to nation-wide conversations about reforming the legal aid funding model.
Since our inception in 2020, we have touched more than 30,000 of our local neighbors in need, ranging from phone advice, to referrals, to actual legal assistance all the way through an appeal process for their eviction. Many of our clients are single mothers of color. Our network is vast, and we collaborate with community partners across the spectrum of needs to assist our clients with their legal and non-legal needs, including rent assistance.
General operating support assistance allows us to remain good stewards of the resources entrusted to us. More than 80 cents of every dollar donated goes directly to legal defense of those in need. An investment in DEAC’s efforts will allow us to continue to serve the most critical needs of our neighbors and will allow us to help them remain in their homes. We hope to hear from you soon.
The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center is committed to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. We are intentional in our hiring and volunteer recruiting. Recruiting clients, however, requires no effort. 90% of our clients are people of color and nearly 70% are single mothers. Eviction disproportionately affects minority communities, and that's who we exist to serve.
Organization name
Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center
Causes
Housing, Shelter & Homelessness
Operating Budget
$1,000,000 - $2,999,999
Counties Served
Dallas
BIPOC Serving
Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx
Address
2921 Leeshire Drive