Broken Promises: Futures Denied - Broken Bridges Second Edition

In 2018, members of the Youth Advocacy Program developed the publication Broken Bridges. We talked about our harsh experiences inside of placement facilities and came up with recommendations that we hoped could help stop others from experiencing what we went through. It is intimidating for youth to share stories of trauma and harm; being able to speak our truth as a group in this publication helped us to make an impact locally and nationally while supporting each other. 

Despite years of advocacy, stories of harm in these facilities continue, and stakeholders continue to build new facilities and allocate more money to support congregate care for children. During this time, multiple facilities have been found to be unsafe for children and shut down, but some then reopen under different ownership and contracts. It’s a mockery to youth when these placement facilities reopen after all the harm they’ve done. 

Youth advocates from Juvenile Law Center’s Youth Advocacy Program wrote Broken Promises: Futures Denied to show the public and policy makers that youth still experience many of the same things we experienced in juvenile placements. We also want to inform people that these problems occur in other congregate care settings like group homes in the dependency system. 

This is a guide for stakeholders to understand the experiences of young people in placement facilities. This publication contains narratives of the youth advocates’ experiences in placement, their recommendations for change, and sample questions for advocates and courts to use to gather information about young people’s experiences in facilities.