I responded poorly to my students’ needs because of ‘compassion fatigue.’ Overwhelmed by work and stress, I had exhausted my resources for being patient and caring that week.
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Automatic Voter Registration could impact as many as one million eligible voters, many of whom are people of color and low-income residents who have traditionally faced obstacles in the voter registration process.
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Last night, Just Democracy once again sent ISBE a letter signed by Ami Gandhi detailing our serious concerns about the Commission's revised request, which would risk the privacy of each of Illinois’s eight million voters.
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This week, Chicago Lawyers’ Committee says farewell to an exceptional lawyer, Ryan Cortazar.Ryan is completing the prestigious Redstone Fellowship for Harvard Law graduates, and we are deeply honored that he chose to make Chicago Lawyers’ Committee home for his fellowship. We congratulate him on his upcoming clerkship with Judge David Hamilton on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Bloomington, Indiana.
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On Wednesday, the vice chairman of Donald Trump's Election Integrity Commission, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, sent a letter to election authorities across the United States seeking voter roll data that includes name, address, birth date, the last four digits of Social Security numbers and voting history going back to 2006. Read our letter to the Illinois State Board of Elections.
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During the 2016 general election, our Voting Rights Project ran a hotline to assist people experiencing problems trying to vote. More than 300 legal volunteers were trained to answer phone calls and monitor hundreds of polling places throughout Chicago and the suburban counties. With the help of Moment Design, you can now explore the data to see how different Illinois voters experienced various barriers to the polls in 2016.
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This spring, with dark clouds gathering in our country and city, I wish you blessings that you and your loved ones can hold fast to hope.
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"Housing discrimination personally offends me because of my background."
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"You have to make volunteerism accessible, encouraged, and highly valued, and I think the best way to do that is to eliminate all possible obstacles, aggressively support students who want to volunteer, and help make it easy for them to do so. You can encourage or require faculty to record lectures, implore them not to have tests or things they can’t miss on that day. Our law schools need to demonstrate that these are important values.
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The Chicago Lawyers’ Committee has a pool of about 33 testers and conducts roughly 140 tests every year.
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“It made me feel like, am I good enough to be in an opportunity area? And it made me stop my search. You can’t judge a book by its cover and you can’t just say ‘I don’t want to be bothered with it.’ Everybody deserves a chance.”
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Not since the 1960s have our city and state so urgently needed powerful civil rights legal advocacy.
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With clear signals that more than 60 years of hard-won civil rights gains may be rolled back, our historic mission to champion racial equity and combat discrimination is now more important than ever.
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“Not only are we receiving services that we could not possibly afford, but through your services we are empowered to challenge those entities that have more resources and are inherently more powerful. You give us equal ground.”
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“My friend would be alive today if he had a job.”
Those are the haunting words of a young woman at a community hearing quoted in a recent report by the Great Cities Institute at UIC. The recently released report entitled, “Lost: The Crisis of Jobless and Out of School Teens and Young Adults in Chicago, Illinois and the U.S.,” provides data and anecdotal evidence of young people in Chicago and throughout the state who are unemployed and/or out of school.
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