New York, NY

The Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs plans to expand its NYCitizenship Initiative, the city’s first large-scale coordinated effort to address barriers to naturalization, funded by Citi Community Development. The initiative connects permanent legal residents to financial counseling and support, micro-loans, and legal assistance from qualified attorneys to complete the naturalization application; it provided support to over 7,000 participants in its first two years. The city will also develop the existing school-based program NYCitizenship in Schools and partner with the Human Resources Administration, a municipal agency that serves low-income New Yorkers, to significantly increase access to support to the immigrants seeking to become naturalized among the city’s nearly 700,000 legal permanent residents.