Mission

RAP’s mission is to strengthen children to break cycles of poverty.  We develop and implement innovative and holistic advocacy models that build resilience – the ability to bounce back from adversity – in low-income children and youth. By ensuring that low-income children and youth have both the internal resources and external supports they need to overcome the challenges of poverty, we work towards a time when all children will have an equal opportunity to maximize their potential and achieve their dreams.

RAP’s mission is rooted in a belief that children are born inherently resilient. That is, we believe that when given the right tools, low-income children and youth have the ability to succeed educationally and professionally, build healthy families, and obtain financial security. Young people who falter do so not because of innate flaws, but rather because of the lack of access to educational, emotional, health, and economic resources that form the core of life-long resilience. We work to ensure every child’s access to these resources.

Values

The mission, goals, and strategies of the Resilience Advocacy Project are guided by four core values. We believe that it is critical to:

• Nurture all children’s potential to succeed: All children have an inherent potential to succeed. Legal advocacy for young people should aim to maximize access to the critical resources that nurture this potential;
• Ensure justice for all children: A core promise of a just society is that all children, irrespective of income, have an equal opportunity to live out their potential. The law can and must level the playing field so that all children have access to critical resources that enable them to live out their potential;
• Advance innovative and collaborative approaches to solving entrenched problems: Solving entrenched problems, like breaking cycles of intergenerational poverty, requires that lawyers think in innovative and collaborative ways about strengthening youth and their families, and about how to create systems that protect young people from the crises that can undermine them;
• Respect young people’s agency and voice: All young people should have the opportunity to engage with, and impact, the world around them. All young people want to feel that they are able to make choices about their own futures without having them dictated by society, and that they are able to make the world a better place.