How We Work
-
Organizing-Movement Lawyering Partnerships
In our core role, we embed within long-term organizing infrastructure around investigation of harms and monitoring of policy wins. We support parent and youth tracking and documenting racist and ableist practices in schools. We jointly develop Public Records Act Requests for community analysis. Uplifting that shared analysis as we monitor school district and county policy spaces, we hold system leaders accountable for policy implementation and learning conditions.
-
State-wide Movement Alignment
We facilitate and participate in state-wide and national communities of practice that are critical, brave, and intentional in reflecting on and honoring the centrality of community organizing. We cultivate multidisciplinary spaces that ultimately aim to dismantle systems of oppression. We recognize that the legal system and policy spaces, which in themselves reify and reinforce systems such as white supremacy and ableism, must also be critiqued and reimagined.
-
Community Education Defense
We strive to co-create and democratize legal tools so that families can leverage their innate power to shift school culture towards centering the dignity of students and parents.
Our liberatory lawyering model of work grew organically out of our more than a decade-long partnership with CADRE. CADRE organizes Black and Brown Parents in South LA with a focus on racial solidarity/healing, long-term leadership development, and political education. CADRE’s vision is for transformed relationships between parents and schools that in turn create transformed conditions for learning.
They have led the way on all major school climate and discipline policy reforms in Los Angeles Unified School District. Maisie Chin, Co-Founder & Executive Director emeritus of CADRE, along with her organizing staff and parent leaders, took the time to give us loving and critical feedback. Through deep listening, we learned from CADRE how we could transform our understanding of how attorneys and organizers can work together.
