Connecticut Veterans Legal Center
Passionate about access to justice and trauma-informed practice, Chelsea has chosen to dedicate her life to serving the community that requires legal aid the most: low-income individuals struggling with mental illness and trauma. Her primary practice at CVLC remains heavily focused on veterans struggling from severe mental health diagnoses accessing the healthcare and services that they need to heal. Her recent access to justice advocacy includes expanding access to re-entry services to incarcerated veterans and developing pro se legal resources for all veterans stigmatized by unjust “bad paper” discharges.
Chelsea began her career at CVLC as a Connecticut Bar Foundation Singer Fellow representing survivors of military sexual trauma in VA Benefits cases. Prior to her Singer Fellowship, Chelsea worked as clerk for the Connecticut Judicial Branch. Her graduate career includes clinical experience as a social worker for incarcerated people reintegrating into society. She earned her J.D., cum laude, from Western New England University School of Law and her M.S.W. from Springfield College. She is admitted to the Connecticut State Bar and Court of Appeals for Veterans’ Claims (CAVC).
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Connecticut Veterans Legal Center
Since 2009, CVLC has co-located and collaborated with the VA CT’s Errera Community Care Center to create the country’s first VA medical-legal partnership. This partnership is the essential component to CVLC’s success in helping to serve Connecticut’s most vulnerable veterans. The warmth of the Errera Center, the richness and depth of the attorney relationships with the client groups and clinicians on site, and the seamless integration of attorneys as part of the mental health care available to veterans at Errera allow CVLC to be truly accessible to veterans. The medical-legal partnership model allows CVLC staff and volunteers to serve marginalized clients, many of whom are homeless and many of whom have serious mental illnesses including schizophrenia, bipolar and major depression. This co-location means easy access to free legal assistance, without any transportation or scheduling barriers. This also creates unique opportunities for multi-disciplinary teamwork between VA social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, peer specialists and CVLC staff and volunteer lawyers, paralegals and law students. Because of the success of this model, in 2014, CVLC added the VA CT's Newington campus as a second VA medical-legal partnership location for on-site services. In 2017, CVLC added CT's Department of Veterans Affairs in Rocky Hill as its third site.
Employees
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