Youth First Justice Collaborative

Year Founded: 2016

Youth First Justice Collaborative’s mission is both bold and essential: to end youth imprisonment entirely, and to replace our country’s punitive youth justice model with investments in life-affirming community-based alternatives.

Youth First Justice Collaborative works from the conviction that young people who have lived inside the carceral system are best positioned to take it apart. The organization resources a national network of state campaigns fighting to close youth prisons and redirect that spending into communities, arming them with organizing training, communications strategy, fiscal analysis, and peer cohorts that turn scattered local efforts into a connected force. It develops directly impacted young people as organizers and campaign leaders through the Block X Block Youth Leaders Fellowship, and funds partners to develop sustainable and winning campaigns to end youth incarceration in their state. Artists and cultural projects bring the realities of youth incarceration to wider audiences and make the alternatives feel within reach. The result is campaigns with the skill, leadership, and staying power to win state policy change — and a generation of organizers positioned to keep winning it.