Ayuda Legal Puerto Rico

Ayuda Legal Puerto Rico is a non-profit organization that provides free legal education and accompaniment to low-income individuals and communities. Through legal empowerment strategies and services, we accompany organizations, groups, and communities to defend their human rights. In 2023, we will advance work directed to protect housing, equitable use of recovery funds, and workers' rights. We strengthened legal awareness efforts, including those carried out through ayudalegalpr.org, the main legal information platform in Puerto Rico. We received nearly 1.2 million users and ensured access to more than 600 accessible resources. We made helplines available to communities, including hotlines and chats, serving more than 7000 families with legal information and advisory needs. We provided legal services to low-income families with needs regarding foreclosure processes, evictions, disaster assistance, displacements due to domestic violence, and discrimination. We advocated to change administrative guidelines on disaster assistance, with emphasis on relocations and housing destined for disaster survivors. We created a worker's rights unit with an emphasis on women workers. This work was introduced with a policy paper on women workers' conditions. Compliant with 501c3 regulations and funders' guidelines, we drafted and ensured an amendment to the Domestic Violence Act, which permits the acknowledgment of economic violence as a form of gender violence. We advanced the design of legal empowerment hubs, which contain materials and support for specific populations such as elders and domestic violence. We hosted summits on housing justice and just recovery, reuniting local and US stakeholders around issues that impact the right to stay and return to Puerto Rico.