Online Resources for Immigrant Advocates

Immigrant advocacy and legal support providers at nonprofit agencies across the country face ever-greater challenges as they seek to help members of the immigrant community with complex issues ranging from applying for U.S. citizenship and becoming civically integrated in our society to what happens to families when a parent faces deportation. One ongoing need to help meet these challenges is, simply, information: where to find resources, services, legal help, family assistance, and even the forms needed to enroll an immigrant child in school. To address these problems, in 2008 Pro Bono Net (www.probono.net/), a national nonprofit organization that partners with nonprofit legal organizations across the United States and Canada to carry out their mission of increasing “access to justice for the millions of poor people who face legal problems every year without help from a lawyer,” collaborated with the  Catholic Legal Immigration Network (www.cliniclegal.org ) and other nonprofit immigrant legal service providers to establish the Immigration Advocates Network (www.immigrationadvocates.org) with the goal of making essential information and materials related to immigration law available to organizations in the field. Using innovative online tools, the Immigration Advocates Network provides assistance that includes a library of substantive resources such as manuals, podcasts, online videos and web-based trainings; a national calendar of immigration trainings and events; immigration news and practice alerts; and listservs and announcement lists on immigration topics. Support is provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Four Freedoms Fund, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the Zellerbach Family Foundation, among others.