Tahirih is Expanding Nationally
The Tahirih Justice Center has some exciting news. We are becoming a national organization and will open our first pilot field office in Houston, Texas, in 2009! After we establish the Houston office, we will refine our expansion model and open additional field offices in locations around the country. We hope that through a national presence we can provide legal services to more immigrant women and girls fleeing gender-based violence and increase the impact of their voices in important public policy debates.
Tahirih made this strategic decision in response to heart-wrenching phone calls from immigrant women and girls throughout the United States who are fleeing violence and are desperate for legal representation that they cannot find locally. Some have even moved to the Washington, DC area to receive our services. Over a decade of serving the Washington, DC community, Tahirih has refined a model for providing high-quality services that is efficient, holistic, and replicable. Our partnerships with pro bono attorneys and other professionals, who donate their time and expertise to protect our clients, quadruple the impact we are able to have on our clients. This means that we turn every dollar you donate into four dollars of services and advocacy! Most importantly, our model for service delivery protects the lives of the women and girls we serve and, despite the complex cases we litigate, we have maintained a 99 percent success rate.
We have also decided to grow nationally in order to make a greater impact on federal laws and policies effecting immigrant women and girls fleeing violence. While our advocacy has always been valuably informed by the grass-roots experiences of the women and girls we serve, our national expansion will strengthen that perspective and allow us to speak to lawmakers with an understanding of national trends. We will continue to be involved in appellate litigation to establish legal precedent on issues affecting our clients.
Over the two past years, Tahirih has taken deliberate and concrete steps to determine how national expansion will unfold. Tahirih’s Board and senior management have been involved in an intensive process of preparing internal infrastructure for growth and researching best practices for replication. Guiding our city selection process were several factors including immigration trends, the location of our pro bono partner law firms, the availability of complimentary services for clients, the presence of like-minded organizations, and the support of local foundations, corporations, and individual donors. To ensure that our growth is informed by the lessons of other organizations, Tahirih Board members and senior staff conducted interviews with 10 nonprofit and for-profit organizations that have undergone successful expansion.
While we understand that a process of growth is never easy, nor entirely predictable, we feel confident that through our thoughtful reflection and planning, we will be able to protect the lives of immigrant women and girls fleeing violence on a national scale. As we grow, Tahirih is committed to maintaining the quality and level of services in the Washington, DC community.
Photography: Daniel Arizpe.
