Strategic Planning / Capacity-Building / Brand Strategy Analyze strategic and tactical strengths and weaknesses / Understand how PAC is perceived and valued in the field / Isolate durable internal strengths from context reliant advantages / Build a framework for thinking about PAC’s futurePAC is a unique and valuable innovation in clinical education and practice / Why aren’t there more PACs? “That’s what we say about all great new ideas,” and “clinics are a relatively new invention”
Opportunity
From their academic home at UC Berkeley’s School of Law, the Berkeley Policy Advocacy Clinic, or PAC, has quietly revolutionized clinical JD and MPP pedagogy. Around a dozen staff members work with students to engage community-based clients to craft legislation, do advocacy, and change laws. Students graduate with skills that they would otherwise only attain years after earning their degrees.
If this sounds small, it is not: PAC has helped wipe billions of dollars of racialized wealth extraction off the books forever by abolishing juvenile fees and fines in California and across the country.
As juvenile fees and fines fall to PAC’s success, they came to us to find out what they should do next, how they should do it, and why.
Approach We started with a holistic retrospective and analysis of the Clinic’s strategy and praxis, landscape, brand, theory of action, and operations. We held over 40 interviews and six workshops with PAC stakeholders, partners, clients, deans, colleagues, legislators, and funding partners.
Very quickly, we discovered that this ambitious yet humble clinic is intensely respected and influential — to the point of adoration — and that the clinic is unique in its form and function.
The embarrassment of opportunities shifted our goal from finding the PAC’s next move to figuring out how to choose a next move. Or, more likely, next moves.
Impact
Our 70-page findings, analysis, recommendations, and implementation strategy report with executive summary deck serves as the foundation for PAC’s ongoing organizational development.
We continue to support PAC as strategy and brand partners.