All people should have an equal opportunity to thrive, not just survive. All of us should be able to earn a living, find a home, get an education, and support ourselves and our families. No one should be too poor to live.
Systemic racism and inequities, however, keep people — particularly people of color — from accessing the mainstays of economic life; including education, employment, and homeownership. Ongoing discrimination, structural inequality, biases, and the insidious nature of white supremacist racism cause racial disparities in wealth, income, and institutions that impact almost every facet of our everyday lives.
Connecticut’s economic laws, policies, and practices have endangered and harmed people of color, especially Black and Latinx people, including by preventing the intergenerational accrual of wealth.
Through litigation and advocacy, we aim to remedy deeply entrenched sources of economic inequality and ensure that access to opportunity and the ability to build wealth is available to all. We seek to end prison debt, to ensure access to credit and other financial products for people living with a record of arrest or conviction, to establish a fair workweek and fair scheduling for workers, and to reallocate money out of policing and prisons and instead into programs and services that expand opportunity, health, and safety for our communities. We oppose the ongoing criminalization of homelessness and poverty. We support efforts to create access to affordable and quality health care, combat food insecurity, create affordable utilities and prevent unjust rate hike increases, align the minimum wage for incarcerated workers with the minimum wage for people on the outside, provide free meals for children in school, create Medicaid coverage for diapers, end the “pink tax,” and mandate the disclosure of salary ranges in job postings.
