The Greater Boston Citizenship Initiative (GBCI) is a new collaborative project created by the Fish Family Foundation and the MIRA Coalition in partnership with six immigrant and community-based organizations in Boston. GBCI organizes monthly group processing clinics that offer legal permanent residents access to free citizenship application assistance, test study materials and referrals to legal services, citizenship classes and ESOL instruction.
After four clinics, GBCI has served more than 600 legal permanent residents and helped close to 400 immigrants complete citizenship applications. In order to do this work, they rely on volunteer service. Each clinic needs around 60 volunteers to serve an average of 200 clinic participants. To offer high-quality services, all volunteers are offered trainings on the application and fee waiver forms.
The next clinics in the greater Boston area are on April 21, May 19 and June 30. Trainings are provided by our Federal Policy Director the week prior to each clinic. Trainings provided by the Federal Policy Director are typically from 5:30-6:30 or 7:30 and are offered about three times the week prior to each clinic. The MIRA Coalition will also be organizing citizenship clinics statewide with the first statewide clinic will be held in Framingham on March 24.
Both these greater Boston and state wide clinics provide an excellent opportunity for students to gain experience with client interaction. Further, hours dedicated to this clinic can be put towards your public service transcript notation.
If interested in the next Boston Clinic on April 2nd please visit the registration site. For more information or to register for other opportunities you can e-mail citizenship@MIRAcoalition.org.
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