The Escambia Project is an ongoing initiative to provide Escambia residents with greater access to civil justice. It utilizes a unique community approach to developing new legal help services that are accessible and easy to use.

The Escambia Project launched in February of this year, supported by Pathways for Change, Legal Services of North Florida, and the Florida Bar Foundation.

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Moss was inspired to seek new ways of providing legal services to those in need after attending a national conference and hearing a presentation by Margaret Hagan, Director of the Legal Design Lab at Stanford Law School.

“So, my approach to legal services, social services is that when we think about how to be innovative, how to change things for the better, we should be as creative and community driven as possible,” Hagan said.

It’s an all-inclusive, bottom up process that Hagan refers to as “Design Thinking.” It allows the stakeholders to come together to openly share ideas, set an agenda and then brainstorm, with the goal of being as ambitious and creative as possible.

“And then from that process start to winnow down some small pilots to run, some small versions of new ideas that we can test, we can criticize, but that we can kind of get feedback on,” said Hagan.