The Pitch
ALAS removes racially & ethnically discriminatory barriers to education, career opportunity, and civil rights by interrupting school to prison & school to deportation pipelines.
ALAS trains educators to write strategic letters to judges for arrested youth. 100% of ALAS youth have been released from jail to school pre-trial.
ALAS trains educators to connect immigrant youth to our pro-bono attorneys who win permanent residency at an 88% rate. Permanent residents qualify for federal financial aid and pay in-state tuition instead of out-of-state tuition, making higher education financially accessible.
ALAS organizes youth and families to do educator training and policy advocacy to change the oppressive underlying policies and practices.
Lisa María Rhodes & Yasmin Falcon Morales
The Entrepreneur
Lisa Maria Rhodes, is a local social worker, organizer, and educator who created a system to support over 260 system-impacted students and has extended that to 5 schools and over 600 youth. She has worked with Orleans Public Defenders in partnership with LCCR to implement effective court mitigation over the past 5 years and has also worked on immigration reform for the state of Louisiana. Lisa Maria started NOLA Educators Support Immigrant Students to create awareness of problems and solutions as well as support for educators. Lisa Maria has been a New Orleans educator for the past 12 years. As a native Spanish speaker, she regularly engages recent immigrant students and families without permanent residency, largely from Vietnam as well as the mostly Spanish speaking Central American triangle of Honduras, Guatemala & El Salvador.