WILMINGTON — The Legal Aid Society of North Carolina’s Wilmington lawyers are moving offices in 2026 thanks to an Endowment grant making up for funding losses.
By the end of summer 2026, the district branch is moving to the Harrelson Center on N. Fourth Street from its Front Street location to operate in a hub with 20 other nonprofit organizations. A recent $1.1-million grant from The Endowment is helping the move.
READ MORE: Endowment remains elusive on funding relationship with government, accountability metrics
Legal Aid received the funding in November, after $300,000 from the county ended in October. Commissioners did not vote to keep $1.6 million for noncounty agency organizations — such as the Domestic Violence Shelter and Services and Cape Fear Literacy Center, among others — in the budget for 2026.
Also $6.5 million from the state was cut.
The Endowment grant is being used to put Legal Aid’s 11-person staff into a Harrelson Center office, taking over the space from Catholic Charities. Before, a majority of Legal Aid’s staff members were located on Front Street, while three staff members were already in the Harrelson Center to run the Second Chance Project.
Second Chance helps individuals with expunction, or the sealing of criminal records, and driver’s license restorations, to promote future financial stability. Having a driver’s license dramatically increases a person’s job pool, and allows further access to more opportunities. Legal Aid has closed at least 116 cases in 2025 alone through the project.
Being altogether in the Harrelson Center is a benefit, according to Rebekah Garcia, project director for Legal Aid of North Carolina’s Medicaid advocacy project and one of the practice group managers for public benefits. Being in the same office will allow staff to work more seamlessly and effectively by allowing for easy access and collaboration among varied departments within Legal Aid.
The Front Street office will close in 2026 once the full move is finalized.
Legal Aid Wilmington serves the tri-county region providing legal services to underprivileged and low-income individuals and families within 187% of the federal poverty line. It closed 623 cases in New Hanover, Pender, and Brunswick counties in 2025, and 1,075 cases across New Hanover, Pender, Brunswick, Bladen, Columbus, Onslow, and Duplin. The Wilmington office handled 415 of the cases directly.
The organization’s lawyers and legal professionals handle housing disputes and domestic violence cases most frequently, but also do public benefit cases, foreclosures, disaster recoveries, and more.
Legal Aid has been funded both at the state and local levels, specifically receiving $350,000 from New Hanover County from 2022 through 2024, as part of the noncounty agency organization budget. Legal Aid’s grant was reduced to $300,000 for the 2024-2025 fiscal year budget, before being cut out completely among other noncounty agency organizations in fiscal year 2025-2026.
“It was significant,” Garcia said. “It was paying for two attorneys and a paralegal.”
Since the cuts, Legal Aid has had to prioritize certain cases over others because it no longer has the means to accommodate the same number of clients. Thus, intake has slowed.
“So it’s really making impossible decisions,” Garcia said of the funding cuts leading to undesirable priority shifts, like public subsidies over private landlord-tenant disputes. “Because nobody deserves housing more than anybody else.”
Port City Daily asked Commissioner Rob Zapple if there was a possibility the noncounty agency money could be added back in moving forward. He was unable to say for certain but explained how “nonprofits became an easy target” when his Republican colleagues fought to bring the tax rate down to revenue neutral, after a soaring tax property revaluation saw property rates increase on average by 67%.
Zapple, who is running for re-election in 2026, believes, with only three votes needed, the board could rescind its decision at some point.
“I need three votes to restore it,” he said.
The board has two seats up for grabs in 2026, with a Democratic primary election to be held in March as four candidates are in the running for two seats. Republican Chair LeAnn Pierce is also re-running and Republican Richard Collier, who lost a city council bid last year. However, next year’s budget will have already passed by the 2026 November election with primarily a Republican-leaning board still in place.
Zapple said he received a lot of calls from nonprofits complaining when the money went away.
“They’re now wondering: Are we going to get any kind of recognition or funding?” Zapple recalled.
The county’s funding loss was coupled with funding freezes at a state level. Legal Aid Society of North Carolina was deprived of $6.5 million, or 15% of its total budget, leading to the closure of nine offices across the state.
But Legal Aid was never in the state budget. Instead, the money that was paused for one year came from a fund called “Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Accounts,” which provides pay to civic organizations working with legal needs for low-income individuals. The Legal Aid Society is the largest recipient of these funds in the state.
State GOP lawmakers expressed concerns that Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Accounts funds were being used for DEI initiatives and political activism. The money was proposed to be redirected to the Indigent Defense Services, a state office for low-income individuals to receive legal representation. Instead, the funds were frozen until June 30, 2026.
An amount could not be provided to Port City Daily regarding the state funding lost by the Wilmington office, as Garcia explained Legal Aid doesn’t operate as independent branches, but as part of the larger organization. She pointed to the downtown and Harrelson Center office consolidation as evidence of the funding cut’s impact locally.
On the upside, Harrelson Center Executive Director Meade Van Pelt emphasized the importance of having Legal Aid at full capacity to work in tandem with the other nonprofit agencies in the campus hub.
For example, the newly launched Housing Navigator Program helps keep people in affordable residences. But should legal services need to be procured, it’s easier to go to another office in the same building than to have to actively travel to a different location — and often cheaper, when considering transportation fares.
Garcia believes in the importance of Legal Aid’s work, especially given the affordable housing crisis in New Hanover County. According to the North Carolina Housing Coalition, 54% of renters in the county have difficulty paying rent or find the rent to be burdensome.
“We help with private landlord, tenant housing cases,” Garcia explained, but explained the funding cuts endured this year restrict the amount of cases they can take on locally. “We have to prioritize keeping the subsidies for our clients in public housing. If that’s lost … it’s just lost. They will not have access to housing.”
Adding to demand, evictions are higher than they have been in the last 13 years, according to recent reporting from WHQR.
As well, Garcia and Van Pelt pointed to frequent overlap between domestic violence survivor needs and the Legal Aid Society. Located in Harrelson Center as well is the Community Justice Center, which works with the Domestic Violence Shelter and Services, the Wilmington Police Department, New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office, Novant Health, Rape Crisis Center and more. CJC can link domestic violence survivors and unhoused people with resources in one stop and also refer clients to the Legal Aid Society as needed.
With the future of local funding largely uncertain, nonprofits like Legal Aid are also turning to alternative routes, like donor pools and fundraising, though Van Pelt cited concerns with donor fatigue.
“They don’t want to be the sole funder,” she said. “Often the question is: ‘How will you sustain yourselves after we provide this initial funding?’”
As the new year approaches, new cases for the Legal Aid Society in the Harrelson Center have slowed down, though Garcia expects an uptick after the holidays, especially in housing disputes.
“Bills are always due,” Garcia said. “So it never slows down here.”
[Ed. note: The article has been corrected to reflect that IOLTA funds were not redirected to different services, but rather frozen until the end of June.]
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