By Dawn Chase, Virginia Poverty Law Center

As the Virginia Poverty Law Center was packing to move to new quarters last month, attorney Jill Hanken sifted through papers she amassed during almost thirty years of civil legal aid work.

Occasionally, she would pause. “I remember this case,” she’d exclaim, leafing through a file nostalgically before tossing it into the shredding pile.

For Hanken, those papers represented a decades-long quest to make health care accessible to low-income Virginians—work that required countless hours attending meetings about Medicaid, children’s health insurance, hospital charity care, and other public health topics.

Read the full story

Published: March 2012