We invest in young people as leaders within their communities and beyond and support them to reach their self-defined goals.
The Center for Justice Innovation works with youth to create paths to economic mobility, build community safety, and address the inequities and racist policies in the criminal legal system that have disproportionately harmed and criminalized BIPOC youth.
Transformative relationships among staff, young people, and the community are the foundation of the Center’s model. We invest in young people as leaders within their communities and beyond and support them to reach their self-defined goals.
Initiatives
Youth Impact
Youth can be transformative leaders, addressing inequity in their communities and the factors that lead to youth involvement in the criminal legal system.
Identity-Based Initiatives
We provide affirming space for young people to explore their identities, build community, pursue self-care, and access healing spaces with an intersectional lens.
Youth Entrepreneurship and Social Enterprise
Social enterprise and entrepreneurship programs nurture young people’s skills to develop career pipelines and start businesses, solve local problems, and support economic development.
Youth-led Placemaking
Youth-led placemaking forges strong connections between individuals and their environments to create public spaces that foster community well-being.
Youth Arts
Art engages young people to build creativity, skills, and create networking opportunities to support educational and career trajectories.
Youth Action Institute
The Youth Action Institute is a public policy research fellowship that supports young New Yorkers in investigating and testing solutions to the issues and policies that affect their lives
The Youth Action Institute hosted a virtual panel where they shared their experiences and justice work, and talked about how we can positively impact and center the needs of queer and trans youth.
The Bronx Community Justice Center works to create a safer, more equitable Bronx through community-driven public safety initiatives, youth opportunity, and economic mobility efforts focused in the South Bronx. Our vision is to support the South Bronx community to become a safe and thriving place where local ownership, community-led investment, and youth opportunity can flourish. The Bronx Community Justice Center works toward this vision by focusing on community safety, restorative practices, and youth and economic development.
Restorative justice is about repairing harm. But for Black Americans, what is there to be restored to? This special episode of New Thinking features a roundtable with eight members of our Restorative Justice in Schools team. They spent three years embedded in five Brooklyn high schools—all five schools are overwhelmingly Black, and all five had some of the highest suspension rates in New York City.
In a series on gun violence in New York by The Trace and The Guardian, the second of three articles looks at how law enforcement’s ability to solve a crime, especially a shooting, can build or erode trust between law enforcement and the community affected. The article references multiple studies, including the Center's own report, Gotta Make Your Own Heaven, which documented that young people who carry firearms in communities with higher rates of violence often fear the police, which contributes to their decision to carry.
In a series on gun violence in New York by The Trace and The Guardian, the final article details the complex reasons that shootings have declined in Brooklyn, crediting Brooklyn’s more-developed infrastructure of Crisis Management System groups and its network of community-based organizations, like the Brownsville Community Justice Center. Hailey Nolasco, our director of community-based violence prevention; Mallory Thatch, program manager; and Deron Johnston, the deputy director for community development, share their perspectives on on the changes—both positive and negative—Brownville has seen regarding gun possession and violence.
Philadelphia is one of five major cities receiving national funding to study the factors driving youth gun violence. The research model involves hiring people with lived experience to ask questions in their own neighborhoods. Our Elise White and Basaime Spate, who are leading the study, share how having credible people ask the questions will improve turnout and the quality of responses. "The folks who live the experience also end up controlling the data at the end, so they control the narrative. And that’s an extremely important thing when you look at the way that gun violence gets talked about,” says Dr. White, research director.