Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • ‘If You're Like Me, You Can't Sit By. This Is America.'

    Connecting children with volunteer lawyers can greatly assist immigration cases. Nonprofits like the Safe Passage Project and Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) work to provide children, often separated from their families, with legal defense. Without a lawyer, many children face immigration hearings alone, adding great trauma to a complicated process. A majority of unrepresented children are deported. Nonprofit legal groups across the US are working to create a safety net of legal counsel.

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  • 4.5 Million Young People Nationwide Are Not Working or in School. How Cities Are Working to Get Them Back on Track — & Avoid the School-to-Prison Pipeline

    There is a certain population of youth aged 16-24 that are neither in school nor working because of some derailment (oftentimes burdensome responsibilities) along the way. A national organization called Nxt Level helps people get back on track with their goals through a specialized team that helps an individual with things like getting a GED, mental health or legal resources, job training, and food programs. They even work with local businesses to give the kids a chance and hire them upon their completion of the program. Nxt Level now has centers in Baltimore, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and more.

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  • ‘It's Like an Automatic Deportation if You Don't Have a Lawyer'

    With the help of legal counsel, immigrants facing deportation are more likely to win their cases and keep their families together. The New York Immigrant Family Unity Project is one of several organizations in New York that provides lawyers free of charge to detained immigrants. The program is also a part of the broader Safety and Fairness for Everyone (SAFE) network, which includes 18 cities that have set up legal defense funds for immigrants.

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  • In Nigeria's overcrowded prisons, Catholic group frees inmates through free legal services

    Thousands of people incarcerated in Nigeria’s rapidly growing prison system, many of them awaiting trial without lawyers, receive free legal, health, and educational services from an NGO that for decades has paid twice-weekly visits to prisons around the country. Serving the prisoners’ general welfare, the Catholic Institute for Development, Justice, and Peace seeks the release of defendants on bail, advocates for better health care, and delivers aid packages to people held in the overcrowded lockups.

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  • America has a housing segregation problem. Seattle may just have the solution.

    A group of economics researchers and county officials in the Seattle area teamed up to create a more comprehensive approach to housing vouchers. Rather than simply provide a rental voucher, the city piloted a program that included information about the city's areas of economic and social opportunity, increasing the number of families that moved into higher-economic regions of the city.

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  • Court Observers Are Shining a Light on the Immigration Court System

    One way that any ordinary citizen can lend a hand to the plight of those caught in the American immigration system is by being a court observer: someone who sits in immigration court and takes notes by hand. Several organizations are working to develop a standardized way of evaluating judges' treatment of migrants to put it in a central database so that the data can be used to evaluate the human impact by the system as a whole. People who participate testify to the job alleviating despair over the situation as they can mitigate any unfair practices going unnoticed.

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  • Will Banning Single-Family Zoning Make for More Affordable Homes?

    Minneapolis serves as a model for other cities as it addresses the affordable housing crisis by de-incentivizing the development of single-family houses. By changing zoning laws to benefit the construction of duplexes and triplexes, the city makes room for more low-income families to afford to live in city limits.

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  • A Unique Military Program Helps Sexual Assault Survivors. But Not All of Them.

    Members of the military who are survivors of sexual assault have access to special victims’ counsels to help guide and protect them throughout the legal process. The efforts are still young, and with that comes issues of ill-trained or over-worked legal representation – a criticism that has been made known by advocates. Furthermore, while the existence of such assistance is extremely beneficial to military personnel, the same sort of protection and support isn’t available to civilians who are alleging violent crimes against military members.

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  • Detroit Bail Project aims to disrupt the process of cash bail and incarceration

    The Bail Project is posting bond for men and women who cannot afford to pay and haven’t been convicted of a crime. Based in Detroit, the nonprofit has locations across the country and uses a revolving fund to bail out individuals, meaning once the bond is recovered, the funding is then available for another person. Its Detroit location has bailed out nearly 200 individuals in an effort to end mass incarceration and prove that holding people – most of whom are people of color or experiencing poverty – does not diminish recidivism.

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  • Fully fund the state's PILOT program

    Connecticut's PILOT program was created to partially reimburse cities and towns for state-owned, tax-exempt properties and take some financial burden off smaller towns. The PILOT program, however, is voluntary, making it easier for state legislators to disregard the reimbursement requests in tough financial times. Now, state officials are urged to make the PILOT program mandatory to keep the response working for the small individual towns and cities around Connecticut.

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