Chair Lee questions legal support hotline outreach and call outcomes

Okay, and then moving to the legal support hotline, because I know that you were saying that you received 14,700 calls in FY26,

and I know the council also supported this with an additional 500,000 in FY26 to further expand the hotline, I think, and outreach to the Asian and African communities.

And so just wanted to get a sense of...

How you sort of, and you sort of mentioned this already, but how you were able to partner with ethnic media or local community-based groups to do the outreach for the hotline specifically.

Yeah.

I'll share a little bit about the council's support.

Also, you know, we appreciate the additional investment in FY26 to help just bring more awareness to the hotline and specifically do outreach to these particular communities.

Right now, MOIA is currently finalizing a targeted multilingual NOIA Rights media campaign that's supported.

through this additional funding.

We anticipate to launch that in mid-June.

The campaign is being designed specifically to reach New Yorkers, some of the more hard-to-reach New York communities, specifically in our Asian and African communities, through our ethnic media platforms.

And our outreach will be expanded to include radio and TV and print and digital media and also other platforms, frankly, that more of these communities utilize, like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

The campaign, and we can share additional breakdown, but there are a number of languages that will be included in this as part of

the outreach campaign in Wolof, in Tibetan, in Korean, in Bengali, and we can provide the council with a full list.

Okay, great.

And then how many of the total 14,700 callers were effectively connected to legal services providers, and how many of them actually received legal support, if you have that?

So just to clarify on the numbers, from July 1, 2025 to May 15, 2026, the hotline received 19,000 calls.

Okay.

So it's 19,830.

When a caller calls the hotline, we do not collect PII information, so personal identifying information.

We do direct them to our legal support centers.

Overall, the legal support centers have served over 12,000 people.

Okay, and okay, so, but that doesn't just include the legal services, but maybe referring them to different community organizations for other types of support, or is this specifically just for the legal?

The hotline itself provides referrals to primarily our legal support centers for legal services.

That's sort of the why it was created, but it also provides connections to other agencies and things to that extent.

Okay.

Okay, great.