Announcing 2022 Racial Justice Training Opportunity for Illinois Legal Aid Leaders

With support from the Lawyers Trust Fund of Illinois, The Chicago Bar Foundation, the Illinois Bar Foundation, the Illinois Equal Justice Foundation, and the law firms of Dentons US LLP and Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP, the Shriver Center is excited to offer a racial justice training program for leaders of legal aid organizations in Illinois. George Floyd’s murder in 2020, and the subsequent racial reckoning across the country, generated conversations within our statewide legal aid community about the urgent need to bring an explicit racial equity lens to our anti-poverty legal aid practice. This training is one aspect of a broader vision to shift Illinois’ legal aid community to incorporate racial equity principles and practices.

The Illinois legal aid community is partnering with the Shriver Center on Poverty Law to offer this training. The Shriver Center’s Racial Justice Institute is the premier training resource in the country for legal aid lawyers and advocates seeking to build their capacity and skills to champion racial justice in their communities and inside their organizations.

What You Will Learn

• A shared understanding of key language and constructs to help legal aid advocates frame issues through a racial justice lens.
• Advocacy tools to bring race-based claims in courts and other advocacy forums.
• How to integrate racial equity principles and practices into the culture and operations of our organizations, including organizational change management, priority setting, and alignment between mission and practice.

Who Should Attend

Each legal aid organization is invited to send two senior level leaders who have decision-making authority within their organizations. Executive Directors and Legal Directors are highly encouraged to attend. We are targeting this audience because we believe that buy-in from top-level management is critical to incorporating a racial equity lens in our organizations.

Virtual Training Dates

The Shriver Center’s Racial Justice training approach is highly interactive. To keep learning groups a manageable size, we are offering this training in three cohorts on the following dates:

Training Cohort 1
February 17, 2022, 12:00 – 5:00 pm
February 24, 2022, 12:00 – 5:00 pm
March 3, 2022, 12:00 – 5:00 pm

Training Cohort 2
March 24, 2022, 12:00 – 5:00 pm
March 31, 2022, 12:00 – 5:00 pm
April 7, 2022, 12:00 – 5:00 pm

Training Cohort 3
April 21, 2022, 12:00 – 5:00 pm
April 28, 2022, 12:00 – 5:00 pm
May 5, 2022, 12:00 – 5:00 pm

Registration

Please register by December 6, 2021.