With Your Support 2019

Our Opportunity to Learn program seeks to ensure young people of color can access high-quality public education so that every child reaches their potential. In addition to supporting community efforts to stop the closure and privatization of public schools, we continue to mount an effort to end the school-to-prison pipeline and the criminalization of students. In 2018, along with our partners, we launched a national campaign to remove police from schools. Police not only undermine nurturing environments, but they are also using excessive force on students while feeding the criminal justice system through arrests. Instead, students need schools with healthy and supportive school environments with counselors, restorative justice practices, and divestment from policing.

Advancement Project National Office has spent this year developing new action and training tools for the field to be used more widely in communities around the country who are organizing for #PoliceFreeSchools and access to quality education. To build on our “We Came to Learn” report and advance our campaign for #PoliceFreeSchools, we released a microsite in August 2019. The microsite is a hub for advocates that provides news and updates, videos and campaign tools. It also features our #AssaultAt map that charts incidents of students being assaulted by school police in their places of learning. The list and map are ever growing with every instance of school-based violence, reflecting assaults that are captured on video or reported to local or national news outlets.

With national momentum, we have continued to take the movement for #PoliceFreeSchools to a localized level and focus specifically in Philadelphia and Miami. This year, we continued our work with Power U Center for Social Change in Miami on a school budget campaign, successfully demanding a decrease in funding for school police and heavy security measures, and an increase in funding for student-centric support including counseling, nurses, and mental wellness services that are integral to their success. We successfully won the budget fight with our partners when the board announced that they would:

• Almost double the staff at the Department of Mental Health
• Increasing certified mental health professionals from 30 to 55
• With the Department of Mental Health, roll out a "Community Advisory Committee" to monitor implementation
• Implementing “Rights, Respect, and Responsibility” in providing a more comprehensive sexual health education
• Contract with the Working to Institutionalize Sex Ed (WISE) initiative to train teachers to become certified peer mentors

Advancement Project National Office has been able to deepen its work in the criminal justice space. Not only have we institutionalized our existing policing work through the establishment of the Justice Project, but we have also established cross-programmatic efforts on criminalization.

At the start of 2019, we moved this work forward by helping to file class-action civil rights litigation as part of a campaign in St. Louis to #CloseTheWorkhouse, a local jail known for terrible conditions and holding people based on their ability to pay exorbitant bail amounts.

In January, when we filed litigation in St. Louis, Missouri, "The Workhouse housed almost 1,000 people, 95 percent of whom were there pre-trial because they could not afford bail. There were eight times more Black detainees than there were white detainees, even though only 47 percent of St. Louis City’s population is Black. The average stay was almost 300 days. The Workhouse is notorious for being a remnant of Jim Crow that used to force inmates into hard labor in lieu of payment of fines and bail. It is well known for its horrible conditions, including guards forcing people into gladiator fights, exchanging sex for food, black mold, rats, snakes, and inadequate medical care. People continue to die in the jail today.

Advancement Project National Office filed the lawsuit in order to change the policies and reduce the jail population so that The Workhouse could be closed. The suit alleged that the city and courts are running an illegal cash bail scheme that resulted in the unlawful detention of hundreds of poor people and Black people. The suit was announced live with our co-counsels, ArchCity Defenders, Georgetown University Law Center's Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, and Civil Rights Corps on January 28, 2019. Days after the announcement, the editorial boards of local newspapers ran stories on the campaign and lawsuit, including the Riverfront Times.

In June, we experienced a major victory in the campaign when a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction requiring bail hearings to determine ability to pay bail to every person arrested within 48 hours of their arrest and a hearing within one week to all those who are currently being held in jail awaiting trial. This shortened timeline and focus on a fair cash bail means people in St. Louis no longer face sitting in jail for months waiting for a hearing when they have not even been convicted of a crime.

Thus far we have had significant results in closing the workhouse and confronting cash bail:

• 119 people have been released; 13 of them had their cases dismissed;
• The released people had already spent a combined 30 years in jail;
• Average bond has been reduced from $18,000 to $287

This year, our Immigrant Justice program has focused on the overcriminalization of Black and Brown people, regardless of immigration status, and the lack of transparency and accountability of the stakeholders and processes in immigration. Over the past year and a half, our attorneys have conducted stakeholder visits to “detention centers” and worked with our grassroots partners on campaigns to address the "crimmigration" system. As a result, we produced a report titled, The Carceral State of Arizona: The Human Cost of Being Confined, which is based on our research and findings from the Eloy Detention Center outside of Phoenix, Arizona. We launched the report in partnership with Puente Human Rights Movement in November 2019 along with companion action tools including videos of impacted people, social media toolkits on InsideEloy.org.

To further investigate the lack of transparency around immigration criminalization, we have filed three Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

• With UndocuBlack, we filed suit to ensure transparency and gather information surrounding the 2017 Visa Sanctions against Cambodia, Eritrea, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. The lawsuit seeks to hold the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Department of State (the State Department), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) accountable to releasing the information, initially requested over a year ago, regarding those affected by the sanctions, why these specific countries were targeted, as well as the nature of guidance and implementation from the agencies
• We filed suit regarding collaboration with local law enforcement and ICE in selected counties in Virginia and the creation of the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE)
• With WeCount!, we filed suit against ICE regarding their harmful practice of using routine traffic stops to target the Latinx community and arrest drivers and passengers for their immigration status.

We officially launched our multi-racial racial justice network, Formation, to create intentional space to build trust, uplift each community’s unique needs, form strategies and share lessons learned. The network includes groups who represent Black, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander, South Asian, Native American and immigrants with the goal of strengthening the movement and fostering unity. In June 2019, we held our first convening to uplift the needs of the communities, build capacity through training, and begin recruiting other organizations that must be at the table.

Organizational health is critical to the sustainability of any organization. This year, Advancement Project National Office completed a strategic planning process and launched implementation of the plan to strategize effectively both on internal operations and our programmatic work.

Inclusion of all staff members was imperative throughout the full strategic planning process. From this, we were able to sharpen our focus and collectively define our “mojo” and unique space in the racial justice movement.

• We are “organizers’ organizers” in that we employ a train-the-trainer model to share expertise with activists in organizing, campaigns, and mobilize strategies through our campaigns strategy team.
• We are movement connectors and capacity builders, bringing together grassroots organizations in relationship with other organizations in ways they may not otherwise.
• We provide an integral convening space for national and grassroots organizations alike.
• We are community lawyers and bring litigation capability and legal expertise to the racial justice movement, in service to building power at the community level and not just winning a case.
• Finally, we are narrative changers and leverage our national media profile, broad social media reach, and the amplifying effect of the grassroots organizations we partner with to create public demand for fundamental systemic change.

With our strategies and strengths defined, we were able to attract and solidify two exciting partnerships and grants. In 2019, we were named one Players Coalition Charitable Foundation’s first grantees. As part of this partnership, we held a National Week of Action and produced content with NFL athletes to amplify racial justice issues through messaging delivered by athletic influencers.

We also partnered with Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream on a national campaign highlighting the over-criminalization of Black and Brown people, featuring our grassroots partners’ efforts in St. Louis and Miami. In September 2019, Advancement Project National Office launched our own ice cream flavor, Justice ReMix’d™, that can be found in grocery stores and Ben & Jerry’s scoop shops nationwide through April 2020. A portion of the proceeds of all sales of the flavor, will directly fund our work.