Power In Partnership: From Wins to Implementation
Creating Care-First Models For Youth
This year, Liberty Hill and our community partners achieved groundbreaking wins for youth and transformative justice. Dedicated activists, organizers, and young people on the frontlines of youth justice paved the road to these victories with determination, resiliency, and passion.
Community-led, care-first strategies are now front and center and widely understood. Thousands of young people are now entering youth centers instead of jail cells, engaging with counselors instead of police and probation officers, and nurturing their hopes instead of feeding their fears.
Los Angeles has a strong network of youth organizing, advocacy, and development organizations, such as the Los Angeles Youth Uprising (LAYUP) coalition, which brings together the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, Arts for Healing and Justice Network, Children’s Defense Fund-California, Urban Peace Institute, and the Youth Justice Coalition to push for real systemic change.
The First Steps to Ending Youth Incarceration As We Know It
Thanks to the work of frontline partners like these, Liberty Hill’s vision to end youth incarceration as we know it is coming to life through systemic changes such as: the decline in youth incarceration and arrest rates by 51% and 60%, respectively; the launch of the LA County Department of Youth Development with initial funding of $50 million; the earmarking of $287 million by the County Board of Supervisors for the Care First Community Investment (Measure J) initiative; and the reallocation of nearly $40 million away from law enforcement approaches to youth development programs through the Ready to Rise partnership, which served more than 25,000 youth.
This work is the culmination of days, months, and years of collaboration, learning, strategizing, and organizing between dozens of organizations and hundreds of people. Educating and mobilizing are key to building power, and that is what LAYUP and its coordinating partners seek to achieve—people power.
