NEWS STATEMENT 04.23.24: IMPACT FUND GRANTS $131,500 TO SUPPORT SOCIAL JUSTICE LITIGATION
One grant funds a class action lawsuit that seeks to significantly reform Alaska’s foster care system.
Berkeley, CA 04.23.24 – The Impact Fund has granted $131,500 in its spring grant cycle to fund three separate lawsuits. These cases aim to safeguard the rights of foster children in Alaska, halt the discriminatory use of gunfire detection technology in Chicago, and protect Montana consumers from gender and marital status discrimination by insurance companies.
“Our grantees model the highest and best use of our courts: using litigation to expose injustice and give voice to people and communities struggling to be heard. Our litigation grants help to amplify their work and achieve a more just society for us all,” said Impact Fund Executive Director Lindsay Nako.
The Impact Fund provided funding to A Better Childhood, Inc., to support a class action lawsuit against Alaska’s governor, the Alaska Office of Children’s Services (OCS), and several OCS executives for violations of foster children’s constitutional and statutory rights. The lawsuit alleges that Alaska has failed to exercise sufficient oversight over its child welfare system, which serves 3,000 children and is plagued with problems. Caseworkers are often undertrained and overworked. Too often, children are shuffled across many placements, including overly restrictive or inappropriate facilities, homeless shelters, and out-of-state institutions far from their families. Alaska Native children, who make up more than 60% of foster youth, often lose cultural ties due to being placed in non-Native homes. The case aims to end the ongoing harm experienced by foster youth in Alaska and implement significant systemic improvements to the Alaskan child welfare system.
In the second class action funded, Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym, Ltd., is challenging Chicago’s use of ShotSpotter, an unreliable gunfire detection technology, on the basis that it leads to unconstitutional police encounters and is deployed in a racially discriminatory manner. The city has deployed ShotSpotter in the 12 districts with the highest Black and Latino populations, effectively blanketing Chicago's South and West Side, while majority-white neighborhoods generally do not have ShotSpotter sensors. Despite a high false alarm rate exceeding 90%, Chicago police respond to roughly 100 ShotSpotter alerts daily. This often leads to police unnecessarily and forcefully detaining innocent residents, usually people of color who happen to be near the location of an alert. The case seeks to end Chicago's discriminatory use of ShotSpotter while providing a blueprint for challenging the technology nationwide.
Finally, Upper Seven Law received a grant for a lawsuit challenging a Montana law that permits insurance companies to discriminate against women and unmarried people in ratemaking determinations. In 2021, the Montana Legislature passed House Bill 379, allowing insurers to consider sex and marital status when setting insurance premiums. Despite claims that the law would benefit women, it has led to inconsistent gender-based pricing, often resulting in higher premiums for women. The law affects all Montanans who use insurance, particularly the 400,000 women living in Montana and the 44% of Montana residents who reside in rural areas and heavily rely on car transportation. If successful, this case will not only protect Montanans from gender and marital status discrimination in insurance decisions, but it will also lay the groundwork for other cases against insurance industry players who profit from discrimination.
ENDS
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About The Impact Fund
The Impact Fund was founded in December 1992 to help advance economic, environmental, racial, and social justice through the courts. Originally envisioned as a purely grantmaking organization, the Impact Fund has made 781 grants totaling $9,557,451. Click here for Grant Criteria and information about Grant Deadlines.
Since its inception, the Impact Fund has grown to include both advocacy and education in its range of services. Today, the Impact Fund litigates a small number of cases directly, authors amicus briefs, provides a substantial amount of consulting to civil rights practitioners free of charge, and presents an annual conference for plaintiff-side class action practitioners, a training institute for budding public interest class action practitioners, and numerous seminars and webinars. Click here for the 2023 Annual Report.
What Is Impact Litigation?
Impact Litigation is a lawsuit, often a class action, where the outcome of the case may have effects that reach beyond the parties to the case and advance economic, environmental, racial, and/or social justice for a community or a larger group of people who may not have access to the courts on their own.