Harriett Buhai Center for Family Law
Project: Strategic Planning
About the Harriett Buhai Center for Family Law:
The Harriett Buhai Center for Family Law is a nonprofit legal services organization founded over 40 years ago by the Black Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles, the Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles County Bar Association. Dedicated to ensuring meaningful access to justice and stability through the family law system, the Buhai Center serves low-income Los Angeles County residents in need of legal assistance with child custody and visitation, child support, parentage, restraining orders, divorce, property division, and spousal support.
Why the Buhai Center partnered with Lyons-Newman Consulting:
The Buhai Center entered a new chapter when Stacy Horth-Neubert became executive director in December 2023. Stacy brought to the Buhai Center her deep connections to the Los Angeles legal community and expertise in pro bono services, having previously spent 25 years as a commercial litigator in large international law firms, while also leading their pro bono programs. The Buhai Center was facing external threats to funding and an abundance of ongoing requests for services from the community beyond what the organization could provide.
Stacy and the Buhai board and leadership team sought to undertake a strategic planning process to answer a number of strategic questions, including: How can they improve and deepen the Buhai Center’s services, support more families who can benefit from their services, and enhance their impact in the community? They sought a growth plan they could implement while effectively navigating change, building the team’s skills, and adapting to expected and unexpected opportunities and challenges.
The process:
Working closely with the Buhai Center’s executive director, staff leadership, and board members, we guided the Strategic Planning Committee (SPC) through an inclusive and collaborative process. Together, the SPC reviewed and updated the Buhai Center’s mission, vision, and values; assessed the family law landscape through interviews with expert informants and secondary research; and explored the Buhai Center’s unique role.
The process included interactive staff leadership team and SPC meetings with thoughtful activities to generate priorities for the Buhai Center’s future, and an in-person retreat where SPC members gathered to get to know one another more deeply and engage further with the plan through staff presentations and an interactive gallery walk.
To support performance measurement and ensure that the plan will be actionable and meaningful across all levels of the organization, we also supported the staff leadership team in crafting detailed performance metrics for each strategic goal and conducting implementation planning. This helped the Buhai Center’s staff understand how their individual roles contribute to achieving its strategic priorities and advancing its mission to ensure meaningful access to justice and stability through the family law system.
The results:
The Harriett Buhai Center for Family Law’s 2026-2030 Strategic Plan sets forth an ambitious vision at a time of significant funding cuts and growing threats to nonprofits serving vulnerable communities. The plan codifies the Buhai Center’s essential role in advancing meaningful access to justice and stability through the family law system.
Over the next five years, the Buhai Center aims to ensure that every qualified potential client knows about the Buhai Center and how to reach them, and that the organization has the capacity to provide quality legal representation to everyone who seeks help. The plan also emphasizes strengthening the organization’s overall operational efficiency to ensure long-term sustainability and impact.
The Buhai Center committed to the following strategic priorities, each of which has corresponding goals, strategies, and performance measures:
Client legal services: Increase the number of clients they serve and the depth of family law legal services they provide.
Pro bono: Expand the pro bono program to further enhance the Buhai Center’s direct legal services.
Public narrative: Raise awareness of the importance of family law in supporting families and advancing justice, and highlight the Buhai Center’s role in providing these services.
Education, outreach, and advocacy: Expand the Buhai Center’s outreach, advocacy, and education efforts, including advancing policy and procedure changes that promote access and fairness in the family law system.
What the Harriett Buhai Center for Family Law leaders say:
“Working with Belinda, Erica, and Lyons-Newman team was an absolute pleasure. They patiently coached our diverse constituents — board, staff, and community stakeholders — through the process. They were flexible with our timing needs while diligently making sure we stayed on track to an on-time completion, and Belinda also liberally gave (and continues to give) of her time to consult with several of our staff. The result is an ambitious yet realistic and flexible plan for growth over our next five years — a plan we are all proud of and excited to implement.”
— Stacy Horth-Neubert, executive director at the Harriett Buhai Center for Family Law