Chicago group gets $ 100K from George Clooney to advocate for kids
For Maria Woltjen, it was a bit surreal looking at the computer in her Hyde Park office Wednesday and seeing a reminder in her calendar for a phone call with George and Amal.
Actor George Clooney and his wife, Amal Clooney, a human- rights attorney and activist, were calling to chat about a $ 100,000 donation from their Clooney Justice Foundation to the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.
Woltjen runs the Young Center — the only organization in the country the U. S. government taps to act as advocates for children being separated at the border from their parents as they try to enter the country.
The group is independent but is based on the University of Chicago campus and works with the university’s law school.
“George and Amal wanted to know what we would use the money for,” Woltjen said. “I said we’ll use the funds to increase our capacity to do our work.”
There’s currently a wait list of children who need advocates. And the donation will go most of the way toward covering the salary, benefits and overhead of hiring an additional attorney to act as an advocate.
Without being able to get into specifics, Woltjen said that a significant number of her organization’s 750 current cases deal directly with the crisis over the last nine months at the border with Mexico. Many of the children they serve are under the age of 12.
The Young Center employs 28 attorneys spread across eight offices around the country. They act as go- betweens for immigrant children, their parents and the various government agencies involved with their immigration cases.
The advocates are not the children’s attorneys. Their job is to offer guidance concerning children’s best interests to immigration judges, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, deportation officers and facilities housing both parents and children in order to figure out the best way to reunite families.
Woltjen said the Clooney clan promoting their work means a lot.
“It will mean more donations for us. I just took a look, donations are coming in over the transom,” she said.