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Our Stoneleigh Youth Advocacy Fellows reflect on why community partnership and youth voice are essential components of effective advocacy.

Youth with lived experience play a

Our Stoneleigh Youth Advocacy Fellows reflect on why community partnership and youth voice are essential components of effective advocacy.

Youth leaders and community-based organizations play

Our Stoneleigh Youth Advocacy Fellows reflect on why community partnership and youth voice are essential components of effective advocacy.

Youth perspective allows people to see

Through policies and practices, more neurodivergent and differently abled children are pulled in and punished at higher rates than their neuro- and developmentally typical peers.

Spoiler Alert: This essay shares plot details from the book, The Reformatory. In the novel The Reformatory by Tananarive Due, a 12-year-old boy, Robbie, is sent to a reform school in the Jim Crow-era South for kicking the white neighbor who sexually harassed his sister, Gloria. The novel portrays the injustices Robbie faces inside the system, but also the way carceral systems affect whole families, as it depicts Gloria’s attempts to rescue her brother from an unfair fate.

Before I worked at Juvenile Law Center, I worked at the Empower Program, the District Alliance for Safe Housing, and Men Can Stop Rape (now MCSR). I have had the privilege of being front and center in the sexual violence prevention field. I know that there are creative, dedicated activists and advocates ready to make common cause with those fighting to ultimately abolish the juvenile legal and foster systems – and to build something instead that works for all children.

The year is 2016. The United States Supreme Court just issued the most consequential decision for children condemned to die in prison. In Montgomery v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court fulfilled the promise it made four years earlier in Miller v. Alabama – that children could not receive mandatory sentences of life without the possibility of parole.

As we enter a new year filled with uncertainty, one thing is clear – we need to keep fighting for children in the justice and foster care systems.