Building bridges. Empowering futures. Elevating public defense.
Criminal legal system involvement destabilizes people, families, and communites
Our mission is to provide material support to promote rehabilitation, recovery, and reentry for public defender clients in Santa Cruz County.
Building bridges
Sometimes all a person needs to continue their journey toward rehabilitation, reentry, and recovery is support to reach the next stage. We help bridge barriers to success by providing public defender clients with resources to meet critical material needs when they need them most.
Empowering futures
Most people know what they need to succeed. Yet, public defender clients often do not have the resources to address the root causes of criminal legal system involvement. By providing material support aimed at tackling systemic poverty, mental health and substance use disorders, homelessness, and other obstacles, we help participants help themselves.
Elevating public defense
The Santa Cruz County Public Defender’s community-based whole person defense model addresses the root causes of system involvement by combining zealous defense in the courtroom, holistic representation designed to meet enmeshed legal and social needs, and robust community engagement. This holistic model helps people identify and break the harmful cycles that drive recidivism, break families apart, and hurt our communities. This “big picture” is important, but sometimes people need urgent help with the basics—things like clothing, a tent, or a lift. We support holistic defense by helping system-involved community members meet their material, educational, therapeutic, and treatment needs.
Why BRIDGE?
Bridges reduce distance, connect people, and overcome obstacles.
Bridging barriers to rehabilitation, recovery, and reentry
Recognizing that small acts of compassion make a big difference
Inspired by the promise of holistic defense
Doing a lot with a little
Giving people help when they need it the most
Engaging our community to lift each other up
“Sometimes it's the little things that make the biggest difference for our clients—shoes when they get out of jail, a tent if they are experiencing homelessness, tuition for soccer camp for a system-involved child who wouldn’t otherwise be able to go. By helping with the ‘little things,’ the Bridge Foundation can make a big dent in mass incarceration.”
— Heather Rogers, Public Defender of Santa Cruz County
Make an impact today
Support our mission by contributing a donation. Every dollar makes a difference. Small steps can lead to big changes for people who need material support for rehabilitation, recovery, and reentry.
“[O]ne of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.”
— Bell Hooks
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