Georgia Asylum and Immigration Network (GAIN) is committed to addressing our clients’ needs by working within our communities and leveraging our partnerships to affect change. Moving forward, we are renewing our commitment to compassionate care and to providing the culturally-responsive holistic legal services our clients deserve. We are proud to announce that GAIN’s Board of Directors has approved a new strategic plan for the organization, for years 2021-2024.

GAIN’s previous strategic plan was our first, and it led us to grow in new ways: we dramatically increased our revenue and more than doubled our staff, which allowed us to increase our impact through our Asylum and Victims of Violence programs. In 2020, we engaged with Successful Nonprofits to structure and facilitate a participatory planning process that included a strategic planning work group appointed with staff, board and advisory board members.

GAIN has been investing in holistic legal services for our clients, compassionate lawyering, and an approach that takes clients’ interests, their cultures, their trauma, and their lives into account. In our new strategic plan, we have mapped out a path forward to invest more fully in our clients’ needs, through and beyond their legal cases. As a part of our strategic planning process, we have updated our mission statement to include the words protect and empower, and to shift our language from victims — a legal definition — to survivors, which is a representation of the way we see our clients’ experiences as more than the trauma they have experienced.

Below are some highlights of our strategic plan:

• Expand strategic partnerships to enhance holistic services for clients. Our clients have needs that go beyond their legal case. We will be investing in our network of referral partners who can provide the legal and social services our clients need to gain safety, stability, and self-sufficiency.
• Enhance legal service programs to serve more immigrant survivors of crime and persecution. We need to invest in more attorneys, legal leadership, and pro bono service in order to meet our clients’ needs, and GAIN is committed to grow our legal programs thoughtfully and keep our clients at the forefront of our work.
• Strengthen GAIN. GAIN has to be strong in ourselves to be strong for our clients. We will strengthen our governance and infrastructure, including our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and build strength in our fundraising to ensure that GAIN’s programs can grow now and in the future.
• We have updated our mission statement: to protect and empower immigrant survivors of crime and persecution.
• We have added dignity and collaboration to our list of core values: courage, compassion, community, dignity, and collaboration.

Finally, our community makes GAIN’s work possible, and we want to give special thanks to our staff, board and advisory members, and community stakeholders who participated in our process. They gave us insight that not only influenced the organization we are today, but also the commitments we are privileged to make to help our clients moving forward.