Paige Orr [1]

If measured by the power and ire of its detractors, the Justice Center looms large. BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee spokesman Bill Steverson puts it diplomatically: “We have a philosophical difference with [Bonnyman].” Sounding off a bit more directly is Craig Becker of the Tennessee Hospital Association, who blames consent decrees—binding pre-litigation agreements between the Justice Center and the state—for TennCare’s current ill health. “They went too far,” he says. “Allowing people to have any drugs, generic or otherwise, and unlimited prescriptions—you can’t sustain that.” Jim Moss, the powerful head of the six-hospital West Tennessee Healthcare system, is blunt and dire in his assessment. “[Bonnyman] has chosen a course of action which very well may destroy the health care infrastructure that is the only source of care for those he allegedly represents,” Moss says.

As agitated as health care leaders are, it’s nothing compared to the political flames fanned. Portrayed as Villain No. 1 by the Bredesen administration, the Justice Center and Bonnyman in particular have been the target of repeated verbal broadsides from the governor and his staff. On Jan. 10, when Bredesen announced his plan to knock 323,000 enrollees off TennCare, he blamed Bonnyman, saying he was living in a “fairyland” if he thought the $8 billion state program could be sustained at its current size. At month’s end in his State of the State address, Bredesen took a not-so-subtle swipe at the Justice Center saying his efforts to reform TennCare were “thwarted by a few individuals in the name of ‘public justice.’”

Much of the news coverage has focused on just this sort of ad hominem attack. But there’s another important story here. At its core, the rise of the Tennessee Justice Center has been an amazing feat of not-for-profit entrepreneurship. From nothing except passion—no deep financial resources or political mandate—Bonnyman and co-founder Michele Johnson have created a juggernaut of public interest advocacy. In a state rightly proud of its reputation for entrepreneurial spirit, the Justice Center deserves a place in the Hall of Fame.

From the Ashes

The Tennessee Justice Center, like many of its counterparts across the nation, was born of an act of governmental pruning. In 1996, fresh off the success of the Gingrich revolution, conservative forces in Congress succeeded in blocking the federally funded Legal Services Corp. from bringing class action lawsuits. Basically, Congress wanted to stop paying people to sue the government and businesses.

A Princeton graduate with a University of Tennessee law degree, Bonnyman had worked for 23 years as a Legal Services attorney, participating in class-action litigation to help reform the Medicaid program, prisons and nursing homes. His work at the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee provided him with experience suing the state and working with policymakers to change public policy that his clients found to be dysfunctional. In 1992, with the state’s Medicaid outlay rising 17%, Gov. Ned McWherter began formulating ways to rein in the cost of providing health insurance to the poor and uninsured, and he enlisted Bonnyman to weigh in on how the TennCare program should be designed. Metro Nashville Finance Director David Manning, who then was commissioner of Finance and Administration, says, “At the time, [Bonnyman] took a step into the unknown. He was very open-minded about trying to put more accountability into the program for [health care] providers and enrollees.”

Two years after TennCare’s January 1994 launch, Bonnyman found himself shorn of federal funding and prevented from directly addressing the needs of the low-income population in the way he knew best. Joined by Johnson, who was fresh out of the University of Tennessee law school and passionate about children’s health issues, Bonnyman decided to branch out on his own. They moved their work into partially finished attic space above the law firm of civil rights attorney Richard Dinkins (now a Davidson County Chancery Court judge, as is Bonnyman’s wife, Claudia Bonnyman). Not initially sure where they would find outside funding, the pair operated the new Justice Center with money from the second year of a $10,000 grant Johnson had received from the Southern Community Partners, funded in part by Chattanooga-based Lyndhurst Foundation. Additional money came a few months later from the Tennessee Bar Foundation, which continues to support the organization today.

In its first year, the Justice Center began receiving a steady stream of referrals from the state’s Legal Services agencies. The class action cases referred to the Justice Center primarily related to TennCare, Johnson says.

With some funding in place and a healthy flow of cases orphaned by the restrictions imposed by the federal government, Bonnyman and Johnson had in a year established the foundation of today’s organization. But one last piece of the leadership puzzle remained.

In 1997, welfare reform attorney Russ Overby left Legal Aid after more than two decades to join the Justice Center. Leonard Bradley, who worked closely with Overby while serving as Gov. Don Sundquist’s chief policy advisor, says Overby “became the best welfare expert outside of the organization that ran it.” A year before Overby joined the Justice Center, Bradley had introduced Sundquist’s plan to reform welfare by helping families make enough income to rise above welfare-eligibility. According to Bradley, Overby and Bonnyman “raised hell” over whether the plan would provide adequate transportation, daycare and adult education. However, the relationship between Bradley and the two attorneys shifted from adversarial to collaborative as they worked to help create Families First, Tennessee’s welfare program. More than 40 amendments were added to the original bill, and the program passed the legislature almost unanimously in 1996.

With Overby’s arrival at the Justice Center the next year, it had at its helm people even detractors admit are among the foremost experts in two areas most affecting the poor—TennCare and welfare.

A nonprofit by any other name…

Throughout it all, the Justice Center has faced the same challenges every nonprofit faces, though ones often exacerbated by the Center’s very public activity.

“Funding is a challenge for all nonprofits, of course,” Bonnyman says. “But we cannot accept funding from federal or state governments, or from private sources whose support might create a conflict of interest. Most large philanthropies are wary of supporting TJC because litigation is inherently controversial.”

While some opponents have tried to paint the Justice Center as a group of lawyers getting fat at the public’s expense, the facts do not bear it out. Over the past five years, the Justice Center has incurred average annual expenses of $664,000, according to its IRS returns. Revenue from attorney’s fees—generally paid by the state in court settlements—averages $405,000. Other revenue, including donations and grants, averages $536,000. (In 2003, the organization received $1.3 million in fees related to a case that spanned from 1998 to 2002. Attorneys’ fees have been sporadic, however, and in 2002, for example, the Justice Center reported that it did not receive any such fees.)

The Justice Center’s current endowment is a respectable $3.6 million, which isn’t large when compared to the current year’s budget of $896,000, of which $416,000 was taken from the endowment. Nor is the budget being eaten by the salaries of employees. Bonnyman takes home a modest salary of about $70,000, a small fraction of what he could make working elsewhere. And forget a company car—friends say he takes the bus to work.

Modest employee pay, a virtue for any philanthropy that wishes to reassure the public its money goes to the people it serves, touches upon another challenge common to any business: employee recruitment and retention.

"TJC’s litigation docket pits us against five of the top national litigation and health law firms in the United States,” Bonnyman says. “Our cases are among the most complex and demanding being handled by any Tennessee law firm. The skill and expertise of our attorneys would enable them to make several times more money working in a private firm, and significantly more working in other public interest settings.”

The Big Picture

In his State of the State address to the General Assembly, Bredesen followed his initial jab at Bonnyman and company with what seemed a larger swipe at the very legitimacy of organizations like the Tennessee Justice Center in affecting public policy: “There are many people who claim to represent the ‘public interest’ in this, but not a one of them has ever stood before the voters,” he said. “The people in this room tonight have earned a vastly stronger claim to represent the public interest than anyone else involved.”

Though not intended as a direct rebuttal, Bonnyman’s words on the mission of the Justice Center are an implicit counterpoint to Bredesen’s implication that the elected best serve the public.

"One of the important functions of the nonprofit sector is to provide continuity and institutional memory for public programs that are affected by turnover in elected offices and public agencies,” Bonnyman says. “For example, we often see new people come into state government and repeat their predecessors’ missteps and errors, unaware of the prior record of failure."

When asked about his organization’s role should TennCare be no more, Bonnyman doesn’t hesitate. “TennCare clients have consumed most of TJC’s resources during recent years,” Bonnyman acknowledges. “However, TJC is not just about TennCare. It is about serving the poor. The poor will still get sick, even if there is no TennCare program, and we will still do what we can to find them medical care. It will just be a lot more difficult.

“Ultimately,” he continues, “our plan is to expand into other areas of importance to low-income families, such as consumer protection, predatory lending, and the like.

Bredesen, who declined to be interviewed for this article, as well as future governors should consider themselves forewarned. Based on the dedication—and arguably the idealism—of Bonnyman, Johnson and Overby, there’s no reason to expect them to waver on any of these issues. Compared to their determination and the Tennessee Justice Center’s institutional memory, even two-term governors can prove transient things.