OhioKAN Legal Bus Tour to offer free legal help in Seneca County

Tiffin, Ohio — OhioKAN’s Legal Bus Tour is returning to communities across Ohio to offer free legal advice to kinship and post-adoptive families.

The Ohio Justice Bus and JusticeMobile legal buses will make thirty stops in communities throughout the state from April through June. Sponsored by OhioKAN, a kinship and adoption navigator program, the legal buses will provide legal advice to individuals who act as the primary caregiver for a child when the child’s parent cannot.

Jo Ellen Simonsen, Regional Director at OhioKAN, explained that a good number of challenges related to bringing new children into a home can be remedied with brief legal advice or help filling out paperwork. At each location, attorneys will provide assistance with advice about civil legal concerns that may arise from kinship or adoption.

The legal bus tour is a unique partnership between the legal buses and OhioKAN, allowing the program to serve individuals at a community level and build local networks of resources. More than one-third of caregivers who have received navigation services from OhioKAN in the past year describe having challenging legal needs.

The OhioKAN team will be alongside the legal buses and local host organizations to welcome caregivers and help them find solutions to their unique situations. Anyone in the community may attend and request legal advice, not just kinship families. Both OhioKAN and legal bus services are provided at no cost to the individual, with funding support provided by Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

The legal bus tour’s partners include OhioKAN, the JusticeMobile, the Ohio Justice Bus from the Ohio Access to Justice Foundation, and thirty community-based host sites that include social service providers, educational organizations, libraries, food banks, and community events.

In Seneca County, the host site is Tiffin City Schools Administration Building at 244 S. Monroe St. in Tiffin, with the North Central Ohio Educational Service Center and OhioKAN also on site with information. The Ohio Justice Bus will provide “first come, first served” appointments on Thursday, April 27, between the hours of 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

OhioKAN Navigators work throughout ten OhioKAN Regions, combining local knowledge with statewide resources to link caregivers to helpful resources, including daily living needs, financial benefits they may be entitled to, or caregiver and child support services. For more information on the Ohio Justice Bus or the JusticeMobile, visit their websites: www.ohiojusticebus.org and www.justicemobile.org.