A Legacy of Learning: 35 Years of Training the CLINIC Network

The late 90’s through 2010 saw the development of web conferencing technology, and as webinars became a popular means of communication and instruction, CLINIC eventually decided to jump onboard the trend.

“I was on [another organization’s] great webinar once, and I thought, gosh, let’s do this too,” says Wheeler. “At first we started doing webinars once per month, free to Affiliates, in addition to our in-person trainings. Then the webinars started ramping up and became very popular.”

“Going virtual with our training certainly broadened access to it,” says Karpinski. “Our smaller Affiliates in more remote areas or ones with fewer resources suddenly had access to training in a new way, and they were grateful.”

In addition to individual webinars focused on specific immigration topics, CLINIC began developing its online training e-learning courses based on increasing demand for virtual instruction.

Since its earliest years, CLINIC has been a leader in providing training and support to non-attorneys seeking to become accredited through the federal government to represent immigrants in their legal proceedings. Known as “accredited representatives,” these individuals can fulfill much of the responsibilities of legal representation for immigrants without needing a law degree. But rigorous training and experience in immigration law is required to gain accreditation from the federal government.

In the early 2000’s, to become an accredited representative, it was customary to attend a 40-hour training in person. “It was exhausting and expensive,” explains Wheeler. “It involved spending a week in some city, where for five days people’s brains were crammed with more immigration law information than they possibly process, and by the end of the week their heads were swimming.”

Wheeler saw an opportunity here for CLINIC: “I said [to our staff], why don’t we turn that into an online course and break it down into little segments and have webinars and quizzes and a final test? That way people can get the information in a way they can digest and without incurring the headache and expense.”

The concept took off – and then kept gaining momentum. CLINIC called it Comprehensive Overview of Immigration Law, or COIL. At first the training team offered it to about 3-4 times per year and capped it at 100 participants at a time, but demand just kept growing as the course became a standard ticket to gaining Board of Immigration Appeals (now Department of Justice) accreditation for non-attorneys. Now, CLINIC has nearly one thousand people register for each COIL course, which is offered 3 times per year.

The team continued to ramp up their online training over the years while also maintaining a steady schedule of in-person trainings, including a popular annual training in El Paso, Texas, which focused on family-based immigration law.

Sarah Bronstein, a senior training attorney who was hired in 2000 and has worked at CLINIC almost 25 years, thinks that expertise in training is what sets CLINIC apart.

“There are other organizations who provide some training in immigration law, but we specialize in it – and we get good at, you know, the actual teaching and training part, because we do it all the time.” she explains. “We get to know the specific audiences we’re training, including our large audience of accredited representatives who are not attorneys. And we practice delivering the complex info in a way people understand, absorb, and can then apply to their work.”

Wheeler agrees that solid pedagogy is a skill the TLS trainers have developed over time.

“Especially with online training, it can be tough to keep people’s attention,” says Wheeler. “You have to make your trainings engaging, spice things up. We try to take breaks for an example, pop quiz, or a joke every few slides, so that people stay focused and actually learn. Just throwing information at people is not very effective.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and all in-person trainings were suspended, CLINIC’s online training ramped up as a result.

“We were well-equipped to handle the pandemic, because of how much time we had invested in doing online webinars and e-learning courses,” says Karpinski. “Of course, we deeply missed the in-person connection with Affiliates, but we kept up the work well during the years where it was impossible to meet in person because we had the technology in place.”

In addition to webinar technology, CLINIC invested in other tech solutions that have paid off for training staff and Affiliates. The CLINIC “hotline” was eventually converted into a web portal through which Affiliates could submit their substantive immigration law questions online, which is now known as “Ask the Experts,” one of CLINIC’s most popular services.

“Moving Ask the Experts online has made it more effective and efficient,” says Wheeler. “Going back and forth through messages on the phone line wasted a lot of time. Now, we get these complex questions via email and have time to do research and refer to the experts within our section on each individual immigration law topic. Immigration law is so complex that you have to specialize, so we rely on each other to help answer questions in the portal.”

“The volume and complexity of questions has increased dramatically, even in just the past 5 years,” says Karpinski. “Affiliates really rely on this service as they navigate their clients’ tricky cases.”

When Wheeler, Bronstein, and Karpinski think about where CLINIC’s training section has been and where it is going, all three express a great sense of hope and enthusiasm.

“We have hired such excellent and experienced staff these last few years,” says Wheeler. “They are really top notch. They help us provide broad technical support and bring fresh energy and ideas.”

Karpinski agrees.

“Some of our new initiatives are very exciting,” says Karpinski. “Especially the new Mentorship Project, which has really taken off.” Through this project, Affiliates receive individualized mentorship on specific cases in order to increase their capacity in new and complex areas of immigration law.

Wheeler looks forward to how CLINIC can continue to grow, improve, and respond to the times.

“We’ve risen above the pack in terms of our quality of training, and now I’d like to see us continue to draw on the incredible, broad expertise of our Affiliate network,” he says.

“We are the only organization of our kind that has the breadth and reach of membership that we do – so we can provide broad-reaching technical support, but also through our network we have an ear to the ground in terms of what our Affiliates are seeing and experiencing every day with their clients. If we can figure out a way to even better synthesize and share that information across our network, so we can learn from one another, that would be powerful.”

Bronstein thinks the way CLINIC training is going “builds on everything we’ve been doing all these years.”

“Knowing that I play a role in helping so many people gain access to high quality immigration legal services is what gets me going each day,” she says. “I am very excited about what the future holds for CLINIC and our network.”