Anita Santos-Singh, founding executive director of Philadelphia Legal Assistance, died Saturday

Anita Santos-Singh, 59, of Olney, a lifelong champion for those going though some of life’s greatest challenges who couldn’t afford a lawyer, and the first executive director of the nonprofit civil law firm Philadelphia Legal Assistance (PLA), died Jan.13 from ovarian cancer.

Born in the border town of Brownsville, Texas, Ms. Santos-Singh, who was named after her mother, was the eldest of three sisters. She graduated from James Pace High School — where among her many activities she was the school’s Viking mascot — and came north to attend the University of Pennsylvania after learning of the Ivy League.

“I think she was motivated to go to Penn because of a recruiter,” recalled Cristina Santos, her sister. “She said, ‘I want to go there.’ Once she got there, she loved Philadelphia.”

Pedro A. Ramos, president and CEO of the Philadelphia Foundation, entered the University of Pennsylvania one year after Ms. Santos-Singh and met her as part of a Latino students’ group welcoming the freshman. “I met her the first week of college. She was a year ahead of me. Penn is a big place and she was part of a core group of folks that helped me find some community,” Ramos said, “and we were friends ever since.”

Ramos described her as the quintessential servant-leader. “That was probably late in the summer of 1983 and she was probably 19 years old and what was she doing? She was in service doing something for somebody else.”

Ramos said helping new people navigate a new environment was something Ms. Santos-Singh would be noted for all her life. Cristina Santos called her a guide for the sisters who were the first generation in their Mexican American family, and Maureen Olives, PLA’s interim executive director, described her as “an incredible mentor and supporter of young people.”

During her years at Penn, Ms. Santos-Singh interned at Community Legal Services (CLS) which ignited a passion for civil legal aid work. She would come to explain what she had learned — that for poor people, a single civil legal problem could quickly morph into a catastrophe impacting so much of their lives. Helping clients who would otherwise face their complex civil issues without a lawyer became her life’s mission.

She once said during an interview on PLA’s website that the one thing she wished everyone knew about legal assistance was that “legal aid contributes to building a more just society.”

After Ms. Santos-Singh graduated in 1986 with a degree in international relations, she attended the University of Michigan law school but upon graduation returned to CLS, now as a housing attorney in the Homeownership and Consumer Rights Unit. A statement from CLS noted that “she worked for seven years and saved countless people from losing their homes.”

Olives said that when Ms. Santos-Singh would talk of her workload from those early days, “I would ask her ‘When did you sleep? When did you eat?’”

In 1996, CLS faced a crisis. Republicans had swept Congress during the midterm elections and targeted the Legal Services Corp. for elimination under their Contract With America. LSC is the largest funder of civil legal aid and CLS’s primary funding source.

Ultimately, LSC’s funding was cut by one-third, but onerous restrictions on the independent nonprofit organizations that receive LSC funding were imposed. CLS responded by creating a second legal services organization, Philadelphia Legal Assistance, that could bid on federal money and accept the government’s restrictions while CLS retained all non-federal funding and performed unrestricted work.

At 32, Ms. Santos-Singh’s became PLA’s first executive director and grew it into an organization that now serves more than 6,000 clients and their families annually.

“For more than 25 years, Anita shaped Philadelphia Legal Assistance to be on the front lines of confronting oppressive race and income disparities, protecting individuals and families, and striving for the greatest community impact possible,” according to Lou Rulli, Ms. Santos-Singh’s longtime mentor, colleague and law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

In 2017, Ms. Santos-Singh faced another funding threat under the Trump administration’s proposed federal budgets. At the time, PLA received 70% of its funding for the then-$4.3 million organization from the federally funded Legal Services Corp.

“With that level of funding, we would likely have to shut our doors,” Ms. Santos-Singh said. But she weathered that crisis, too.

In a statement from the PLA, she was described as “one of the brightest lights of the Philadelphia legal community, laser-focused on bringing life-changing legal assistance to low-income and vulnerable Philadelphians.“

“Where did the passion come from? She appears to have had it from the jump,” Olives reflected.

One of Ms. Santos-Singh’s last efforts before she became ill was to build a highly successful medical legal community partnership. To provide point of contact service, lawyers were embedded in public health centers so that Philadelphians could obtain legal help in their communities where they receive medical care. “That was her baby, ” Olives said.

Olives is now concerned that since the pandemic and remote work, newer employees of PLA won’t learn of the Ms. Santos-Singh she had come to know as both a boss and a very good friend.

“They don’t know she would walk around the office and talk to you. She wasn’t a lofty decision maker. She was in it everyday.”

When she wasn’t working, Olives said, Ms. Santos-Singh loved the tennis star Rafael Nadal, British crime dramas, travel and knitting. But she will also be remembered for her big laugh and sense of humor, and her empathy. “She could say the right thing with a warm smile and a few words and tell you everything you needed to know,” Ramos said.

Cristina Santos said her family in Brownsville is now just learning of Ms. Santos-Singh’s tremendous impact in her adopted hometown — the numerous boards she sat on and the many awards she won including the Hispanic Bar Association of Pennsylvania’s La Justicia Award and the Orgullo Award from the Latino Law Students Association at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2015, she was also awarded the Andrew Hamilton Award (now known as Bending the Arc Award) by the Philadelphia Bar Association. A statement for the Philadelphia Bar Association said: “That award recognizes legal professionals for their ‘achievement, resilience and courage’ — in her work and life, Anita truly embodied those words.”

Last June, Ms. Santos-Singh was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer and began to make plans for PLA’s succession. Olives was named interim executive director a month later.

Ms. Santos-Singh was predeceased by her husband, Persad Singh of Trinidad, who died in October 2022. In addition to her mother, Anita, and sister Christina, she is survived by her youngest sister, Veronica, and other relatives. A funeral service, currently being planned, will be held in Brownsville, and Olives said a memorial service will he held in Philadelphia. Dates for both are not yet determined.

Donations, in her name, may be made to PLA at philalegal.org/donate.