strategies

Justice Power has identified ten legal empowerment strategies that are actively being implemented by immigration organizations (and other community-based organizations) in the United States. These strategies are: 

• Accompaniment: bearing witness, expressing solidarity, and transforming power within courts and other legal settings together.

• Community-Driven Campaigns: provide an opportunity for communities to learn about their rights, build community power, and shape the laws that impact their lives.

• Community-Driven Litigation: an approach to litigation that transfers legal power into the hands of community members. 

• Community Wellbeing: an approach to providing services that see immigrants and the staff who assist them as whole human beings with varied needs and capacities.

• Community Paralegals: frontline justice advocates who create a bridge between communities and the legal systems they navigate.

• Conveners: organizations that play the vital role of bringing grassroots organizations, legal and social service providers, and funders together. 

• Hotlines: provide essential information about the immigration system, access to resources, referrals, and other services to immigrants and their families. 

• Know Your Rights & Popular Education Programs: translate laws into a language that communities can engage and use. 

• Pro Se Legal Clinics: help people know and use available legal and non-legal resources to effectively advocate on their own behalf. 

• Tech Justice: new tools that help build agency, knowledge, and community for immigrants.

Click on each to read more and learn from case studies, and access how-to guides. These strategies are non-exhaustive. Justice Power’s goal is to showcase examples that exist and can be replicated.

Funding of legal empowerment work 

Justice Power is also intended to be a resource for organizations who apply for legal empowerment funding. Obtaining federal funding can be extremely challenging and can be conditional. That is, sometimes organizations are restricted to helping specific demographics of people or cases which can especially leave communities underserved, or organizations are expected to report high numbers, which can create tension between quantity and quality of services. However, there are several funders who do this work. The Legal Empowerment Fund (LEF) offers long-term funding to grassroots organizations who support their communities in tackling systemic injustices and advocating for expanded protections under the law. The Grassroots Justice Network, convened by Namati, connects its members with funding opportunities and advocates for greater financing for the legal empowerment field. It posts funding opportunities on its discussion forum. If you have any questions about how to pitch your legal empowerment projects and programs to funders, please contact us at: [email protected].