URBAN JUSTICE CENTER
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Mission Statement
We provide a platform for dynamic advocates to fuel social change, leading the way for a just, fair, and decent society. By incubating the next generations of advocates, we ensure a better future for vulnerable communities. Established in 1984, the Urban Justice Center (UJC)’s mission is to provide a platform for dynamic advocates to fuel social change, leading the way for a just, fair, and decent society. Through this work, we strengthen families and communities in NYC and beyond. UJC serves NYC’s most vulnerable— low-income and marginalized populations, victims of trauma and abuse, and those facing direct threats to their safety, including survivors of intimate partner and gender-based violence, homeless LGBTQ youth, asylum seekers, victims of human trafficking, people with mental health concerns, immigrants, and people of color who are disproportionately impacted by the criminal justice system. More than 11,000 of the 12,000 households served annually live at or below 200% of the Federal Poverty Level, and at least 45% of clients are immigrants. 80%-90% are POC. UJC is powered by an interdisciplinary team of lawyers, social workers, and advocates who come from diverse backgrounds and share a common commitment to finding innovative solutions to the problems of people who are most vulnerable in our society. Altogether, UJC seeks to make important, lasting changes in the lives of our clients and the systems that impact them, as well as to support early stage organizations in overcoming bureaucracy and institutional inertia, so they can focus on serving their constituencies. UJC’s work seeks both to address poverty and issues that disproportionately impact marginalized groups, as well as to build the capacity of emerging organizations seeking to respond to society’s most significant challenges. The UJC is an interconnected network of anti-poverty initiatives, strengthened by working in concert. Through our unique structure, our individual Projects have unparalleled freedom to pursue their work as they see fit. Each of our 13 Projects is headed by a Director, who is responsible for the work of the Project and for the performance of their team of attorneys, advocates, social workers, and researchers. Each Project is staffed by experts in their own fields who decide the direction of the Project’s work, informed by feedback from their clients to assure accountability and cultural sensitivity to the communities they serve. UJC’s structure fosters collaboration both between Projects and across the organization, with its executive office and central staff providing oversight, guidance, operational and administrative support to each Project. In seeking to both strengthen communities and strengthen emerging nonprofits, UJC has a two-part role. First, the organization supports the work that our 8 Anchor Projects and 5 Social Justice Accelerator Projects do every day for low- and no-income New Yorkers. At our core, we are a civil legal services organization, providing direct services to poverty-stricken New Yorkers (and the community organizations that serve them). We bring impact cases to change the laws and institutions that negatively affect our clients; we help organize our clients to advocate on their own behalf; we release groundbreaking research reports to strengthen and advise other advocacy efforts; and we provide social work interventions for those in need. The work our Projects do is crucial. They directly serve over 15,000 people in need every year, and the ripple effects of their direct services, legal impact cases, and educational and outreach efforts touch hundreds of thousands, in NY and throughout the country.
About This Cause
At Urban Justice Center, we believe in creating a just and fair world through providing legal services and incubating the next generation of non-profits. Our longstanding Anchor Projects serve tens of thousands of people a year, on critical issues ranging from homelessness, to discrimination, to seeking asylum, to escaping intimate partner violence. The freedom we give our advocates has enabled the creation and growth of groundbreaking initiatives, like our Street Vendor Project, which is the first program in the country to advocate for and organize street vendors to work together to create a vendors’ movement for permanent change. By supporting UJC you are supporting a wide range of issues including assisting NYC’s 20k street vendors, who work in public spaces and are frequent targets of legal enforcement actions by police and health officer (Street Vendor Project); ending domestic violence (Domestic Violence Project); providing homeless and street-involved youth with direct representation on civil legal matters (The Free to Be Youth Project); advocating for safe and secure housing, food, and cash assistance for marginalized communities in NYC (The Safety Net Project); and offering legal services to survivors of human trafficking (the Sex Workers Project). Our Anchor Projects are the core of UJC and help to drive change and expand rights for all marginalized people. In the past year alone, we've closed over 11,913 cases, directly helped over 24,000 people, and recovered over $4.5 million in public benefits that our clients desperately needed, but our work doesn't stop here. Simultaneous to these Project-level efforts, UJC also works to identify, bring on, support, and develop new initiatives, aimed at currently underserved communities, which use novel methods to bring about systemic change and provide crucial direct services. Every year, we incubate groundbreaking new projects that are fighting new wrongs or bringing new approaches to longstanding issues. By providing them with material support, guidance, and a community of fellow advocates with hundreds of cumulative hours of experience, we help them leap over the early, difficult stages of nonprofits growth, and get directly to affecting change in their issue area. After decades of working in leadership development and project incubation, UJC launched the Social Justice Accelerator (SJA), a new initiative to formalize its role as an incubator. Introducing the SJA to our unique model allows UJC to combine the vibrant, entrepreneurial spirit of small, grass-roots groups with the reputation, expertise, and network of our larger, more established Projects. This creates a community of experts that nurtures our next generation of leaders and helps them achieve maximum impact for the populations we serve. The UJC SJA is the second part of our approach, which takes the wildly successful incubator/accelerator model of Silicon Valley tech startups and brings it to the nonprofit sphere. Previous initiatives included Family Justice Law Center, Family Policy Project, Peer Defense Project, South Asian SOAR, The Remedy Project .