Our mission is to help low-income immigrants get the right to work in the U.S. so they can make their American Dream come true. BOSTON (PRWEB) June 07, 2021
The winners of Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards were announced today, honoring organizations that are pursuing innovations solving health and climate crises, social injustice, and economic inequality.
ImmigrationHelp.org, a legal-tech nonprofit serving undocumented immigrants, was honored as one of 2021’s top ten World Changing Ideas for Social Justice as a category finalist.
Undocumented immigrant youth, often called Dreamers, have lived in a state of economic insecurity over the past 5 years. In 2017, the Trump Administration terminated the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which had allowed Dreamers to obtain work permits and greater access to higher education. An estimated 1.3 million eligible Dreamers were unable to apply for DACA before it was terminated. Although President Biden has restored the DACA program, filing a DACA application involves complicated legal forms with many supporting documents. And few can afford to pay a lawyer $1,000 to represent them. Thus, without legal help, hundreds of thousands of Dreamers will remain unable to apply for DACA and to obtain work authorization.
ImmigrationHelp.org, incubated in Harvard University’s iLab in 2019, helps Dreamers apply for DACA for free online. ImmiHelp uses a TurboTax-style tool that prepares applications, which then are reviewed by ImmiHelp’s team for accuracy before filing. ImmigrationHelp.org has already served over 4,000 low-income immigrants at various points in their immigration journey.
“We’re a team of immigrants and immigrants’ children from six countries around the world. And we believe that immigrants make our country a better place for everyone,” says co-founder Jonathan Petts. “Our mission is to help low-income immigrants get the right to work in the U.S. so they can make their American Dream come true.”
About the World Changing Ideas Awards: World Changing Ideas seeks to elevate finished products and brave concepts that make the world better. A panel of judges from across sectors choose winners, finalists, and honorable mentions based on feasibility and the potential for impact. With the goals of awarding ingenuity and fostering innovation, Fast Company draws attention to ideas with great potential and helps them expand their reach to inspire more people to start working on solving the problems that affect us all. A panel of eminent Fast Company editors and reporters selected winners and finalists from a pool of more than 4,000 entries across transportation, education, food, politics, technology, and more.
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