Ann Cofell

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Transcript:  “My name is Ann Cofell. I’m deputy director of Legal Aid, and I supervise the offices in St. Cloud, Willmar and Cambridge. I’ve been with Legal Aid for 28 years and have stayed with it because of how much it pays. A lot of people think Legal Aid doesn’t pay a lot, and it doesn’t pay the same kind of salaries that an attorney can get in private practice. But that’s not the only way you get paid.

I was helping a client get SSI, or Social Security disability benefits. The client’s disability was having a memory impairment. She had had leukemia as a child and had extensive radiation, which they found out later causes some brain damage. Her disability was such that she had kids and she couldn’t help her kids with their reading because she couldn’t remember from the start of the page to the end of the page what was happening. But she’d been turned down for benefits. From the time she applied to the time we got the favorable decision was about five years.

I got her cell phone [number] and I called her. And when she pulled over, I told her that she’d won and that she was going to get probably about $20,000 in back benefits. And she started to cry, and she said, ‘My husband lost his job about five months ago and we just got a notice that we were going to be foreclosed on, and we’re not going to lose our house because of this.’

Legal Aid helps keep people in housing, and when it keeps people in housing, it keeps children in schools. It keeps people safe. When kids are safe, they can learn in schools. When a client’s child is learning in school, then my child is learning better too, because they’re sitting next to somebody who’s not afraid about where they’re going to stay that night, whether somebody’s going to hit them, or whether they’re going to have enough to eat.

Every night I go home and know that I’ve made a difference for somebody. I know that somebody has custody of their kids, or that somebody has disability benefits, or that somebody has a place to live because of work that I have done. And that’s a pretty good salary.”