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Learn about current happenings such as the Khmer Youth Experience, Sustaining Organizing Study, youth projects and other updates and reports.

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Get updated on the Right to the City initiative, Research Justice Advocacy, Indigenous Knowledge Project, and other highlights.

DataCenter celebrates 30 years!
Our Lives–Our Stories–Our Vision.

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Greetings from the Youth Strategy Project of the DataCenter!

Working with so many youth organizations around the nation doing educational justice work on the local level, YSP has been observing common patterns of school reforms on the national level. Folks already know high school exit exams and school takeovers arent just happening on a local/state level but on a national and even federal level; the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind Act recommends state takeovers as a solution to low-performing (majority people of color) schools and other means of dismantling public education. The educational reformists behind these recent trends are ten steps ahead of us and certainly don’t listen to community voices. Folks doing work on the ground know this, but for the most part, most orgs dont have the capacity to get into it.

With this in mind, YSP is conducting a series of in-depth research on national educational trends to build basic awareness & understanding on these issues, but also to hopefully help folks to identify targets, strategy & tactics for your local campaigns and to make those national connections.

Attached is our first attempt at looking at school takeovers in California. This is specific to Oakland, but is deeply connected to larger national educational trends of incapacitating public education and disenfranchising poor and people of color communities. The majority of urban school districts throughout the nation already have had mayoral takeovers at the very least (including Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, DC and New York). And an influential liberalminded education reform foundation (The Broad Foundation) and proponent of takeovers has successfully placed superintendents in major urban school districts throughout the nation.

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Researched by the DataCenter for Homies Unidos

January 2002

Since the September 11th attacks on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the U.S. government has embarked on a sweeping crack down on non-citizens living in the U.S. This onslaught on the civil rights and liberties of immigrant populations has focused mainly on Arabs and South Asians. But as laws and regulations have tightened, all immigrant groups have been targeted. This fact sheet reviews some of the changes in the law and some data connected to the on-going campaign of repression against undocumented immigrants and the non-citizen population in general.

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A Data Center Report and National Survey of Grassroots Criminal Justice Organizing

September 2001

by Grace Chang

with assistance from Ryan Pintado-Vertner

Moving Stronger: Needs of the Criminal Justice Reform Movement presents the
struggles, victories, strengths and challenges of grassroots groups organizing for criminal
justice reform across the country. Drawn from a national survey and in-depth interviews
with members and clients of these groups, the report offers the insights and analyses of
long-time organizers and emerging leaders, in their own words.

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