The Initiative for Community Power partners with power-building organizations and the public sector to confront endemic inequality of political voice and power, and to foment and realize innovative and effective strategies that create community power and democratic engagement. The Initiative organizes faculty and student partnerships with racial and economic justice organizations in support of their campaigns, and to help conduct and publish research necessary to advance this work.
Recent Projects
- We created Casita, a comprehensive resource guide for recently-arrived, bussed migrants to New York City, with Make the Road New York.
- We worked with New York Communities for Change to create legal resource material and to conduct a needs assessment of their membership base. We are currently working with them on their efforts to support improved housing code enforcement and environmental building retrofits across New York State.
- We have provided ongoing support and coaching for New York State organizations, such as Citizen Action of New York, VOCAL NY, and The Action Lab.
- We are partnering with the Envision Freedom Fund and the Immigration Justice Clinic at Cardozo Law School to challenge ICE’s pattern and practice of indefinitely retaining hundreds of millions of dollars of low-income immigrants’ bond money well beyond when they can legally do so.
- The ICP is providing significant staffing and leadership support to the Power Working Group of The Forge on an ambitious fieldscan and analysis project to evaluate the state of the base-building left and to elucidate interventions to increase its capacity and efficacy.
- The ICP is partnering with Justice Together on the Community and Movement Lawyering Learning Exchange. Justice Together is a unique collaboration launched in 2020 with a decade-long vision to ensure that people who use the UK immigration system can access justice fairly and equally.