A mighty STREAM…

“Our destiny is not written for us; it’s written by us...”

— Barack Obama

DART teams get results.

DART has collectively leveraged over $450 million to make sure people aren’t priced out of their communities.

DART’s Criminal Justice Collaborative has helped tens of thousands of children avoid being branded for life with criminal records.

 

What impact can we have on Affordable Housing and Homelessness? Our DART sibling organizations provide models for what we can achieve in Manatee.

  • FAST successfully advocated for the county commission set aside approximately $80 million from the Penny Sales Tax over the next 10 years for new affordable housing projects.

  • BUILD has leveraged $141 million in local funding to create 1,700 units of affordable housing for families on the verge of homelessness.

  • HOPE pushed the county commission to establish a $10 million “HOPE fund” for affordable housing.

“My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”

— Bryan Stevenson

 

What can we accomplish with Criminal Justice? Our DART sibling organizations provide inspiration for what we can achieve in Manatee County.

  • Charleston (SC)

    CAJM successfully advocated for North Charleston to perform an audit of its police force for racial bias.

  • Sarasota (FL)

    SURE in Sarasota County built support for the implementation of a Civil Citation program in Sarasota for the first time ever. Within 3 months, youth arrests dropped 77%, keeping kids out of the juvenile justice system and keeping kids’ futures intact to break the cycle of poverty.

  • Multi-Community (FL)

    DART chapters throughout Florida are addressing unnecessary arrests of adults — and particularly the criminalization of poverty that occurs when people end up arrested because they could not pay a fine or fee.

    We are challenging local officials to create civil citations programs for adults so that we can also keep adults from being branded for life with criminal records for non-serious, misdemeanor offenses.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…”

— John F. Kennedy

DART Statewide Criminal Justice Update May 2021

 

“O you who have believed, be persistently firm in justice, witnesses for Allah, even if it be against yourselves or parents and relatives.”

— The Koran 4:135