Mark Melton has big plans underway for Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center, the nonprofit he founded during the pandemic in response to the spike in cash-strapped, suddenly-laid-off Dallasites unable to pay rent and at risk of eviction.
DEAC is in the process of embedding a QR code on the back of its lawyers’ business cards to automate the client intake process as they meet those in need of help in Dallas County’s 10 justice of the peace courts — the courtrooms that handle evictions. DEAC also plans to assist clients who qualify for government benefits like SNAP by automating the application process with data it’s already collecting from the QR code forms. DEAC also aspires to develop a trial notebook, which would provide all case law relevant to eviction proceedings in one place for its in-house and volunteer attorneys. Finally, DEAC has a roster of data projects it wants to get underway.
The problem, Melton says, is he already has two full-time jobs — one as a transactional tax partner at Holland & Knight, the other running DEAC as its founder and board chair — leaving little time to focus on the administrative work required to get these projects across the finish line.
“These kinds of projects are the ones that always seem to slip,” Melton said.
A significant solution arrived this week in the form of a new hire. On Monday, Bill Holston joined DEAC as the organization’s first-ever chief operating officer. Holston joins from another nonprofit, Human Rights Initiative of North Texas, where he spent the last 11 years as executive director.
Founded in 2000, HRI provides pro bono legal and social services to refugees and immigrants fleeing human rights abuses. HRI clients include asylum seekers, children who have been abandoned, abused or neglected and survivors of family violence and violent crimes.
Bill Holston
Holston led the organization through three presidencies, heightened political and legal challenges to immigrant rights and a global pandemic. During Holston’s tenure, HRI doubled the size of its operations, expanded programs in social services and advocacy and attracted top talent for its legal and nonlegal programs. Before Holston became executive director in 2012, he had served as a volunteer pro bono attorney.
“I’ve been involved with HRI since the beginning and will remain involved,” said Holston, who will continue serving on HRI’s advisory board. “Part of good leadership is knowing when it’s time to leave, and I think the timing is right.”
Holston and Melton are old friends. They first met roughly 15 years ago after Melton, a newly minted lawyer at the time, heard about Holston’s “stellar reputation” while volunteering on an HRI case. They got lunch at Cane Rosso and continued to stay in touch over the years. “I’ve always thought of him as a mentor,” Melton said.
Holston said he has spent the past year working with HRI’s board on succession planning, and in the process he began thinking about where he wanted to work next. Melton was the first person Holston thought of working with.
Several months ago, Holston made the first move, asking Melton to meet him for a drink at Goodfriend Beer Garden and Burger House in East Dallas, where he proposed joining DEAC to help run the organization’s procedures and operations.
The timing was fortuitous on Melton’s end; he had been thinking for some time about hiring someone to help him run DEAC, but because of the nonprofit’s rapid growth had been unable to dedicate the time and energy required to find someone who would be a good cultural fit.
Between the early days of the pandemic and now, DEAC has morphed from Melton posting about tenants’ legal rights on Facebook to recruiting a volunteer network of attorneys answering mostly basic legal questions posed by eviction-concerned individuals to forming a proper 501(c)(3) that, beyond representing tenants in eviction court proceedings, provides pro bono eviction appeals, pro bono impact litigation and general advocacy and policy work — and as a result, also requires significant fundraising efforts.
“DEAC’s a real law firm at this point,” Melton said. “We have 10 full-time employees. It’s not just going to courtrooms and helping people — there’s payroll, accounting … all kinds of client issues. Things you have to deal with to run a business. A zero-revenue business, but a business nonetheless.”
After the Goodfriend meeting, Melton said he immediately knew hiring Holston was the perfect plan because he knew his staff would respect him, his and Holston’s “styles mesh really well together” and he was confident Holston would preserve DEAC’s culture.
“I thought, ‘That’s the best meeting I’ve taken in years,’” Melton said.
After some more meetings at Goodfriend over beers and Maker’s on the rocks, they drew up a plan for Holston to join as COO, which DEAC announced in May.
Melton said he also plans to lean on Holston when DEAC makes its next hires. Currently there are six full-time lawyers on DEAC’s staff, but Melton said he needs to hire 10 more by the end of the year so that the legal team can begin 2024 properly implementing a strategy it calls “saturation theory.” The idea is that DEAC will be able to represent every tenant in Dallas County that shows up to court because DEAC lawyers will “saturate” all 10 JP courts every day.
Holston said DEAC was an attractive place to end his career because its mission deeply resonated with him.
“I like the act of being able to even the scales of justice a bit by taking people that don’t have lawyers and making sure their rights are being respected,” Holston said. “That’s a really compelling mission and one I really believe in. I hope that what I can do is help them create the infrastructure necessary to support that on-the-ground work.”
“They didn’t have time to develop a lot of this stuff because they responded to the [community] need immediately — and I respect that,” Holston added. “The other choice would be to sit around and work on [the administrative] process [while] people are getting evicted every morning. But now’s the time to have a more formal process that a growing organization needs.”
Beyond preventing unlawful evictions, DEAC wants to reform the way corrupt landlords behave. Since historically only 3 percent of tenants show up in court, many landlords have no incentive to follow the rules when they evict their tenants. But in 2021, DEAC prevailed for tenants in 97 percent of its cases, Melton said.
“The goal isn’t to just represent tenants; the goal is to solve a systemic problem at scale,” Melton said. “I’ve watched Bill over my entire career … running an organization that day in and day out is pushing the boulder up the hill. With a lot of these [pro bono] legal projects, the scale of the problem is so huge that you feel like Sisyphus — you go up the hill with the rock [only for it to] roll back down. I knew [Bill] had related to that.”
“I think we’ve developed a model where we’re going to push that rock over the hill — we just have to get our organization up to operating scale,” Melton continued. “Who better on my side to push this rock up than Bill Holston?”
DEAC also aims to also reduce evictions through its new QR code client intake project, which Melton wants live by the end of the year. When new clients fill out the intake form provided by the QR code on the back of DEAC lawyers’ business cards, the information will auto-populate into DEAC’s management system, which eliminates the need for data entry and also improves the real-time data DEAC has on its client base, Melton said.
A separate section of the client intake questionnaire asks clients if they are already receiving any government assistance to help with their living expenses — such as food stamps (SNAP), low-cost child health coverage (CHIP) or supplemental nutrition for women, children and infants (WIC). Through the data the client has already provided in the earlier client intake forms, DEAC will automatically know which government assistance programs clients are eligible for, so from there DEAC’s system will auto-populate a single form with the clients’ information to fill out the benefits applications, Melton said.
“All they’ll have to do it is sign it and turn it in,” Melton said. “Hundreds of billions of dollars [in government assistance] go unclaimed every year across the U.S. because people either don’t know they qualify, don’t know that they’re available or they don’t know how to apply. We interface with a population that largely is qualified for these benefits, so my thought is who better to provide assistance in getting them than the people on the ground interacting with them every day?”
“The more money people have to buy food with from SNAP or WIC means more cash they have leftover to pay their rent.”