Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights
The Chicago Lawyers' Committee maintains a focus in a broad range of civil rights and economic justice matters, including: hate crime prevention and response; employment discrimination litigation; affordable housing development efforts, fair housing complaints and fair mortgage-lending advocacy and litigation; and support for a broad range of economic development activity in Chicago, including free legal services to individuals using small businesses/micro-enterprises as strategies to achieve self-sufficiency.
The Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Inc. is the public interest law consortium of Chicago's leading law firms. From nineteen firms in 1969, the Chicago Lawyers' Committee has grown to forty-five member firms today. Each year, over 15,000 hours of donated professional legal services, with a value of over $3 million are directed to civil rights issues by the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee.
The Chicago Lawyers' Committee enforces fair housing laws and works to preserve affordable housing, advocates for the rights and interests of poor children, works to improve the ability of Chicago's Public School system to meet the needs of its 89% minority student population, and represents victims of hate crimes. It focuses on the reduction of barriers to opportunity and the promotion of efforts which increase the capacity of individuals to access and sustain employment. The Committee also provides transactional legal services to community-based organizations working in the areas of housing and community and economic development, to entrepreneurs creating minority owned businesses in disadvantaged communities and to first-time low-income home buyers moving out of federal rental assistance housing and into their own homes using Housing Choice Vouchers. The program philosophy of the Chicago Lawyers' Committee recognizes that locally-based efforts that empower minority communities with the capacity for self-sufficiency are critical to the development of safe and stable urban communities.