Penn Carey Law’s Interdisciplinary Child Advocacy Clinic brings law and social work students together to tackle issues including education, child welfare, immigration, and mental health.
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In Penn Carey Law’s Interdisciplinary Child Advocacy Clinic (ICAC), students blend advocacy across disciplines to represent families and children on a range of issues including dependency, custody, education, child welfare, immigration, and mental health systems while learning fundamental lawyering skills through an interdisciplinary practice.
Kara Finck directs Penn Carey Law’s Interdisciplinary Child Advocacy Clinic.
(Image: Courtesy of Penn Carey Law)
Since 1983, ICAC has provided students the structure and support to provide direct representation to clients while gaining crucial skills through class simulations focusing on interviewing, counseling, and litigation skills. Students then transfer that knowledge into practice, collaborating with experts from Youth Fostering Change, CHOP, Nurse-Family Partnership, and HIAS Pennsylvania.
“In the clinic, law students are able to go beyond a traditional casebook and understand how real-life legal problems arise in their clients’ lives,” says Kara R. Finck, deputy dean for clinical education, practice professor of law, and director of ICAC. “And that provides a really complex orientation for students to learn how to problem-solve, how to fact-gather, and how to counsel so that their clients can achieve their goals.”
Through a unique partnership with Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice, law and social work students collaborate both in and out of the classroom representing clients together, learning legal and social work skills and gaining firsthand experience in interdisciplinary advocacy.
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