i4J’s Structure Impact Area Initiatives

Building tools for policy advocates

Policy advocates work to change laws to advance rights and protections for under-represented populations. But every state has its own laws and policies, which may exist across multiple sources of statute, regulation and court rules. In order to promote change in the law, it is also important to be familiar with the laws of other states that support the policy change an advocate seeks to champion. For policy advocates, particularly advocates in under-resourced communities, locating the laws of their state and of other states can be challenging and time consuming. In addition, policy change requires robust data collection and aggregation, within and across jurisdictions. Policy advocates have limited resources to locate and source data that supports the needs for policy change. Innovation for Justice (i4J) is uniquely positioned as a design hub with the capacity to aggregate large sets of law and data to build helpful tools to assist policy advocates in their mission to address social justice problems. Policy advocates must know the law in order to use the law to change the law. i4J works with the community to provide policy advocates with important data points and model policies in one place that can be used to enact change anywhere across the country.