Do Better: Anti-Oppression in Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare

Oppression takes away people’s power, including the power of self-determination, and relies on the unjust use of power to control another person or group. The various government systems with direct control over the lives of children and youth - the child welfare and juvenile justice systems especially -  routinely and completely strip youth of their power. This Youth Justice Action Month, I call on leaders on child-impacting systems to reduce oppression in their systems by centering youth-adult partnership.

Systems ignore or defy the self-determination of Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ youth, especially, and it’s the rare system actor that asks any youth what they need or want. I’ve frequently heard from youth that adults don’t care why they make certain choices; adults just punish them. That youth feel that way defies any goals of accountability, protection, or behavior change these systems claim to accomplish.

White supremacy baked into the justice system, child welfare agencies, and the courts creates a culture in those organizations focused on the control of Black bodies and families. Judges use incarceration in youth jails to “protect” Black girls who fail to follow judicial commands despite dozens of studies documenting the trauma and abuse youth incur in these facilities. 

Forced boarding schools, which only recently ended, removed approximately one half of all Indigenous children from their families, communities, and culture for more than 100 years. These “schools” forced cultural assimilation to white culture using abuse and neglect and created generational trauma that the U.S. has not even begun to address.

Law enforcement practices put LGBTQ youth into the juvenile justice system at higher rates than their peers and often for survival behaviors adapted by the youth in the face of family rejection. And, once there, the juvenile justice system uses solitary confinement to “protect” LGBTQ youth rather than create supportive, effective responses to their needs, and still fails to keep them safe from high rates of sexual and physical abuse. 

How can adults in these systems partner with youth both to determine the future of their own lives and that of the systems that control so much of their lives?

Youth-adult partnership is a decision-making structure where youth and adults come to the table together, identify an issue or question together, and apply their unique skills, knowledge and assets to solving it together. Everyone shares power, accountability, equal supports for their participation, and a common language. 

At the individual level, adults in the justice and child welfare systems can approach youth as human beings. Take a step back from day-to-day interactions with youth and ask yourself if you would treat an adult the same way. Approach meetings with youth as problem-solving sessions where you work as partners. 

Systems can also do more to meet the basic levels of youth engagement required by federal law. Congress, an institution not known for its power sharing with young people, has long prioritized youth-adult partnership in juvenile justice decisions. Federal law mandates youth with lived experience to serve as equal voting members on State Advisory Groups, advisory bodies that distribute federal grants and inform juvenile justice practices in states. Other federal laws and policies require adults in the justice system to work with LGTBQ youth to identify the safest placements for them. However, evidence demonstrates that states so far have failed to meet these requirements.

Models exist within the juvenile justice and child welfare fields of agencies and organizations centering youth-adult partnership. I’m excited to have worked with some of them, like the Center for Children’s Law and Policy and National Association of Counsel for Children, or learned from them over my career, and am ready to support your agency or organization when it is ready to do more.

How Ready is Your Organization to Build and Sustain Youth-Adult Partnership? Use my new Initial Self-Evaluation and Organizational Audit to find out.

I’ve experienced on many occasions that the most impactful part of supporting a systems change process was when I asked new questions of an organization and facilitated dedicated discussions when everyone answered those questions. All of our organizations are moving all day, every day toward our goals, focused on doing all the things that make the organization a success. It’s incredibly challenging in the midst of that rush to lead deep systems change for ourselves, and deep systems change is exactly what’s required to embed authentic youth-adult partnership into your organization’s governance and operations. 

My Organizational Audit of Readiness to Build and Sustain Youth-Adult Partnership will ask your organization new questions about its connections to young people impacted by your decisions, will reveal alignment between your talk and your walk, and will recommend immediate actions to build on your strengths and turn around weaknesses.

Early Self-Evaluation

I recommend every organization, even ones not interested in a full audit, conduct a self-evaluation of readiness and interest in youth-adult partnership. Is your organization at the starting line of youth-adult partnership? Are you just getting started on a Couch to 5K? Or are you ready to run the marathon of systems change? This self-evaluation forms the first step of the audit process. 

What does an Organizational Audit include?

When you commit to an audit, your organization and I will partner on several steps following the self-evaluation. 

First, we will conduct listening sessions with your organization’s staff and leadership, the governing body if you have one (i.e. a Board of Directors), community or system partners, and youth impacted by your organization’s decisions. We will combine what we hear from all of these stakeholders to form a 360 degree view of your organization’s current readiness to embark on youth-adult partnership.

Second, we will interview a few key members of each stakeholder group. Our goal for these interviews will be additional clarity and a deeper understanding of what we learned in the surveys and listening sessions.  

Third, we will review your organization’s governing and operations documents. These documents reflect both your organization’s origin story and how you carry out your day-to-day work. Do the documents you use every day support your goals? Do they build mutual respect and trust among stakeholders?

I will then provide a written audit report to you, which will outline how ready your organization truly is to embark on youth-adult partnership and how to build on what you have, provide helpful comparisons to peer organizations, and recommend next steps. And we will work together to share the report with everyone who contributed to our learning and with the public. This sharing step is crucial to all future work since it creates accountability within and outside the organization.

I welcome introductory conversations with any organization considering an audit, and I’m happy to review and provide feedback on results of self-evaluations even if you are not considering a full audit. Let’s talk about it!

Doing Better: CCLP is Developing a Model for Youth and Community Engagement in Legal System Reforms

The Center for Children’s Law and Policy (CCLP) invested significant resources to evaluate its own success as an advocacy and policy reform organization and is applying lessons learned, especially about youth and community engagement, to ongoing reform efforts.

The evaluation measured the process and outcomes of CCLP’s Law Enforcement Leadership for Equity initiative, a year-long partnership with four diverse law enforcement agencies. CCLP and the agencies sought to advance equity and reduce system involvement for youth of color through policy reforms. Although youth and community engagement was a stated core component of the process, agencies made little progress authentically engaging youth or communities of color and subsequently did not achieve their racial equity goals.

CCLP will share the evaluation publicly through two reports, one documenting lessons learned from the technical assistance process and the other completing the picture of progress and results achieved by each law enforcement agency.

Committing to an evaluation included multiple hours on the part of staff, as well as time from leaders and community partners of each law enforcement agency, to participate in meetings and interviews, as well as provide historical and quantitative data. CCLP also received financial support to evaluate its own work from a foundation, something I rarely see and wish more foundations would prioritize.

I’ve been consistently impressed with CCLP’s willingness to receive constructive criticism and dedication to applying what they learn moving forward. Already, CCLP applied lessons and recommendations for more authentic youth and community engagement to ongoing work with the Baltimore City Police Department and the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement.

Evaluation Services Supported Learning and Evolution

I provided a robust evaluation of the process and outcomes of CCLP’s technical assistance and the policy reforms achieved by each department, along with recommendations for future progress. My evaluation process included developing measures of CCLP’s target outcomes, collecting and analyzing quantitative data from the departments, as well as collecting and applying qualitative data through interviews and surveys with diverse stakeholders.

As it was the weakest area of progress by CCLP and each of the four departments, I provided the bulk of my recommendations on advancing youth and community engagement in future policy reform efforts by law enforcement agencies and their national policy partners, like CCLP. “Laura’s clear and convincing evaluation and well-founded recommendations drew a clear line for us between the crucial importance of authentic youth and community engagement and achieving the measurable results we seek through our work. Real, robust youth and community engagement can lead to greater equity in justice system reforms,” reports Tiana Davis, CCLP’s Policy Director for Equity and Justice.

I am now documenting more advanced youth and community engagement work by CCLP and Baltimore, with an eye toward measuring how authentic engagement supports better racial equity outcomes in the future.

Next Steps for Greater Legal System Reforms

This evaluation correlated strong partnership with those most affected by reforms with measurable success toward equity and fairness in the legal system. Experts and policy makers at all levels of the juvenile and criminal justice fields have long paid lip service to youth and community engagement, especially with people most impacted by the system. However, efforts to authentically partner with people charged or convicted of crimes, incarcerated people, and/or victims of crime have routinely fallen short of rhetoric.

Authentic engagement of affected people takes time, people, money and leadership. Funders, national or local policy organizations and agencies within the legal system will need to apply the lessons of authentic youth and community engagement to begin achieving the actual results long-promised but rarely achieved.

Doing Better: NACC is an Emerging Model for Youth Engagement in a Key Profession

I’ve had the pleasure of working with the National Association of Counsel for Children (NACC) since the very early days of my business. The legal representation of children and youth in child welfare cases is one of the most important spaces for authentic youth-adult partnership, but, as is common across youth-serving systems, has traditionally prioritized adult-led decisions.

Over the last two years, NACC has dedicated significant resources to becoming a national model of youth engagement for lawyers representing children in child welfare cases. NACC’s strides toward centering youth engagement in its organizational culture and structure include:

• Creating a new part-time Youth Coordinator position and rapidly advancing it to a full-time Youth Engagement Management position;

• Hiring a person with lived experience in the child welfare system to fill that role, reporting directly to the Executive Director;

• Launching a youth advisory board, now called the National Advisory Council on Children’s Legal Representation (Advisory Council), that actively engages and pays young people from across the country to educate legal professionals, co-develop advocacy platforms with legal staff, and develop content for training the child welfare legal field;

• Fundraising to support and sustain its youth engagement efforts; and

• Training its Board of Directors in youth engagement and developing a Board Youth Engagement Committee.

In addition, NACC will soon undertake a strategic plan “refresh” and will partner with the Advisory Council on a revision of NACC’s mission, vision, and policy priorities.

Achieving Better Results through Youth-Adult Partnership

A key example of how NACC now partners with young leaders in its central programming is the process for revising NACC’s Recommendations on the Representation of Children. Changing a process that was exclusively adult-informed in the past, NACC’s Legal Director and the Advisory Council co-designed the framework and priorities for the Recommendations. NACC contributed to the success of the partnership by engaging a human-centered design facilitator to support the process. Youth leaders report seeing their voice reflected in the project.

Effectively engaging youth in this important guidance for the legal field not only means that lawyers may do their jobs better on daily basis, but also demonstrated to the youth leaders on the Advisory Council and to the adults on staff that this model of youth-adult partnership works. NACC’s Legal Director Allison Green says, “Advisory Council members gave us new insights and prioritized important changes to the Recommendations that would not have happened otherwise and will impact child welfare practice for years to come.”

One Key to Success: A Champion

NACC demonstrates how a champion at the highest level of an organization is key to this type of culture and structure shift. NACC’s bylaws long required it to have a youth advisory board, but that requirement went unfulfilled until Executive Director Kim Dvorchak committed to make it happen. “Educating the legal profession about authentic youth engagement is a key part of our work moving forward, and we must serve as a model of youth engagement to be effective advocates and educators,” says Kim. Kim has also led the organization beyond the letter of the requirement toward embedding youth engagement throughout its core operations, including at its annual conference and through partnership between the Advisory Council and Board of Directors.

My Partnership with NACC

Early on, I supported NACC’s youth engagement goals by conducting a landscape scan of youth-adult partnership models in the child welfare field. Kim and I then applied learning from the scan to develop and implement the Youth Coordinator and the Advisory Council selection process, including position descriptions, an interview process, and selection criteria. Bringing in the inaugural Youth Coordinator and group of Advisory Council members were key steps to achieving NACC’s overall youth engagement goals. The intentional, robust process we used took time but has made a tremendous difference in the Coordinator and Council’s success.

I have also provided one-on-one coaching to the Youth Coordinator, and now Youth Engagement Manager, Cristal Ramirez since she joined the team at NACC. Cristal comments, “Coaching sessions with Laura are always helpful. She asks questions that help me develop new ideas and helps me build the confidence to own the unique, worthy professional I am.”

Together, Cristal and I provided an introductory training on authentic youth engagement to NACC’s Board of Directors. The training established a common language and set of expectations for authentic youth engagement among the Board members, all of whom came into the training with diverse levels of knowledge and practice.

What’s Next for NACC’s Youth Engagement

NACC continues to deepen its commitment to partnering with the Advisory Council on driving its advocacy efforts and education resources for the legal community.

In coming years, I anticipate NACC will work to expand its foundational structure and sustain a robust culture of youth engagement. So far, grants and contracts have funded this work, which may become more challenging as philanthropy is often less excited about funding to sustain than it is funding to create. Thus, shifting organizational revenue to more stable sources may prove key to retaining youth engagement structures built over the last two years.

Further, NACC will need to expand a culture committed to authentic youth engagement from its core of committed staff and Board of Directors to its nationwide membership. Already, NACC surveys have shown increased interest in youth engagement among their membership of child welfare law practitioners; how that interest translates into true power sharing and implementation remains to be seen.

I am excited to see NACC’s leadership on youth-adult partnership for the child legal representation profession continue and deepen in years to come!

Do Better: Youth-Adult Partnership in Education Settings

This post continues a series on youth-adult partnership as an anti-oppression tool.

Looking back at the start of school year 2020-21, I recall talk of applying lessons from that pandemic-driven school year to develop a new model for education. As schools return across the country for SY2021-22, I think it’s fair to say we failed to realize that promise. And it’s not because students didn’t speak up about their needs. On this first day back to in-person school for students here in Washington, DC, I offer some reflections about the need and potential opportunities for youth-adult partnership to reduce oppression in education settings. 

The education system is no less oppressive for young people than other youth-impacting systems, such as child welfare and juvenile justice. Education leaders exclusively control hundreds of hours of children’s lives each year, dictate what and how children and youth learn, and even who gets to learn, often without reference to what benefits or is relevant to youth. 

Children and youth, and indeed all of us, are harmed by decisions that whitewash history, inadequately prepare and support teachers to manage diverse classrooms and mental health needs, and prioritize standardized measures learning over the growth and development of lifelong learners.

Push out practices entirely remove youth who challenge teachers and administrators beyond what they’re prepared to handle. The entrenchment of law enforcement in schools, through School Resource Officers, exclusionary discipline policies, and searches or metal detectors at doors, goes even further to criminalize and excise the self-determination of students. System failures to adequately bridge the digital divide during the pandemic removed even more youth from the learning environment. 

How can schools and other educational institutions reimagine sharing power and accountability among adults and youth? 

Youth-adult partnership is a decision-making structure where youth and adults come to the table together, identify an issue or question together, and apply their unique skills, knowledge, and assets to solving it together. Better decisions result. 

Youth-adult partnership can occur between one adult and one youth arriving at a decision personal to them. For example, a teacher and student who’s been causing frequent “disruptions” could partner to identify the root cause of why the student is not engaged, and can co-develop an agreement for moving forward constructively. 

Youth-adult partnership can also look more formal and include groups of youth and adults. A common example is boards of directors with youth and adult members or advisory bodies of youth or families. 

Upcoming posts will highlight growing examples of youth-adult partnership in systems. Reach out to me if you have an example you think I should share or are looking for support to build a model within your organization or institution.

Youth-Adult Partnership is an Anti-Oppression Tool: A Series

Youth-adult partnership secures everyone’s right to self-determination, increases young people’s power over their own lives, and upends the pervasive privilege-oppressor relationship between adults and youth. Youth-adult partnership takes diverse forms but all center on shared power, shared accountability, shared resources, and shared language.

A first step for philanthropic, non-profit and advocacy organizations, juvenile justice and child welfare agencies, and education institutions that seek to reduce oppression should be investing in a sustainable infrastructure for youth-adult partnership. In upcoming posts, I will share practical opportunities for these diverse sectors to reduce oppression through youth-adult partnership.

The Everyday Oppression of Young People

Among the myriad ways humans find to “other” and oppress each other, I highlight the oppression of young people. Adultism, a common term for silencing youth voices and experiences, intersects with oppression of girls and young women, Black, Indigenous and other young people of color, youth with disabilities, and LGBTQ young people. 

However, adultism differs from other forms of oppression in the shift every person experiences over a lifetime from a position of oppression to one of privilege. The automatic and universal experience of aging leads us from a position of oppression as children and youth to one of privilege as adults. 

Human brains are well equipped to cloak and/or justify our oppression of others, thus oppressors rarely recognize their oppression for what it is. The universality of adultism makes it even less likely people recognize it as oppression; we accept it as the normal course of life. It shouldn’t be, and it doesn’t have to be.

Youth-Adult Partnership as an Anti-Oppression Tool

Youth-adult partnership takes a variety of forms but is fundamentally a decision-making structure where youth and adults come to the table together, identify an issue or question together, and apply their unique skills, knowledge and assets to solving it together. Everyone shares power, accountability, resources to support their participation, and a common language. Both youth and adults need increased support to make this happen.

In the various professional spaces where adults make decisions affecting youth, real opportunities exist to improve outcomes for organizations, adults and young people and to reduce oppression through youth-adult partnership.

The Juvenile Justice Information Exchange published a condensed version of this series in an article focused on the juvenile justice system.

Now is the time for structural systemic change

Now is the time to create new decision-making tables that share power among youth and adults. Justice, education and health systems all face crises, and youth affected by those systems are raising demands for systemic change. 

The best way to achieve long-lasting systemic change is to upend the way we make decisions so that those affected by decisions have a real voice in making those decisions. 

Decision-making bodies work best when they:

• Create a new table established with shared power rather than creating seats for young people or others historically denied power;

• Involve representatives of all the diverse communities affected by the decisions of the body, especially oppressed groups often excluded from power;

• Have meaningful power over decisions, including the ability to hold agencies or individual violators accountable;

• Train all members on sharing power and accountability towards effective partnership and decision-making;

• Equitably resource member participation;

• Establish a shared language consistently used by everyone and avoid jargon;

• Have budget authority to implement decisions; and

• Maintain consistent communication with broader groups since one or two people cannot represent the voices of everyone.

Government and community leaders that act now to share power with those affected by their decisions stand the best chance of meaningful, long-lasting change.

Youth voice in the face of a pandemic

"If we truly value youth voice, engagement, and leadership shouldn’t we include them when navigating the scariest and toughest issues?  If anything we believe this is a time to inject more resources, support, and attention to this work."

- Allison Green, Legal Director, National Association of Counsel for Children

While much of the world remains upside down amidst the pandemic, everyone from students, to criminal justice advocates, to national leaders have begun to call for critical thought about our new normal. Whatever new normal we build should center the voices of the people impacted by decisions. 

Now is the time to engage those affected by our decisions in making those decisions. 

Students, teachers and families can help answer the questions about how education should move forward.  

Patients, young and old, can help craft new healthcare services.

Residents, including future voters, will bring crucial input to how our cities and towns, counties and states support citizens. 

Children, youth and families can bring new life to nonprofits and libraries struggling to keep the doors open.

Children and youth have been irrevocably changed by this experience. Our systems and leadership should not expect them, or indeed any of us, to return to business as usual when it was failing so many. They have always deserved a seat at decision-making tables, and this moment, as horrific as it is, provides opportunities that have rarely before existed to create new, inclusive tables for decisions.

Creating a new table for youth-adult partnership

In a recent conversation, a colleague challenged the group to think about how we create new tables for youth and adult partnership rather than invite youth to join existing adult-run tables. For example, rather than add one or two youth seats to a board that’s been adults-only for 5 years, can we disband the old board in favor of a new one that’s crafted by and for youth and adults together? 

This model for crafting youth-adult partnerships is certainly a gold standard that will be more feasible when creating new decision-making bodies vs. re-imagining existing ones. However, the lessons here can apply to even small adjustments if fully reconstituting an existing decision-making body may not be feasible. 

What will it take to redefine spaces for decision-making that revolve around youth-adult partnership?

Humility - Engage youth in deciding how best to engage them. Are we decision-makers even asking the right questions or concerned about the right problems? 

Stepping back - Consider beginning meetings with only one or two traditional decision-makers at the table and slowly adding more. As the new decision-making structure begins to coalesce, youth members retain their positions of authority within the group and invite traditional decision-makers to take on leadership roles if and when they find value in that. 

Money - Fund “mom and pop” community organizations to build youth engagement in the ways that make sense for them. Support capacity building for those individuals or organizations as necessary, but don’t seek to mold them to your ideas of how engagement should look. 

Flexibility - Youth and community are diverse and need diverse ways of engaging in decisions. You may need multiple opportunities spanning a range from one-time, online surveys through and including shared partnership on a board or commission. Just as every decision-making body has those members who only show up when something big is happening, youth may have particular time or talents they can offer. 

Inviting youth to existing decision-making structures is certainly easier, so why invest the additional effort to create new structures?

• Existing decision-making bodies and the systems they represent may have sewn distrust over years or even generations of disenfranchisement, failed promises, and oppression of the youth, families, and communities they now seek to engage.

• Comfort with the status quo enables traditional decision-makers to retain barriers, such as jargon, between them and youth, families and community.

• The structures adults create for decision-making have struggled to make effective decisions since their inceptions, so why not try something different. 

Whether your organization is ready to create new structures for youth-adult partnership or apply these lessons to an existing decision-making body, I can provide guidance, on-the-ground support, and training at any stage of the process. Contact me to explore how we can work together!

Gratitude - I’m grateful to organizations involved in Minneapolis and St. Paul-area fair housing efforts for exhaustively documenting their process and lessons learned, which inforrmed this article. See, for example. 

Youth-Adult Partnership Model: National League of Cities City Summit

Every November, a small team of youth and adult partners delivers remarkable programming for 200 youth from all over the country at the National League of Cities’ (NLC) annual City Summit conference. 

The 200 youth are some of the most civically engaged young people in their communities. They serve on youth councils or mayor’s youth advisory boards, they advocate for local change, and they’re part of national youth-led movements. In short, they are models of active citizens.

Youth councils shared their accomplishments for the year and learned from each other.

A team of about a dozen extraordinary young leaders from this already extraordinary group of youth work year-round to create, plan, and lead the conference content for their peers. They accomplish a full agenda of interactive workshops through a youth-adult partnership with staff at NLC.  

The youth in this partnership create the topics for workshops, develop the activities, select speakers, and lead the workshops. Adult partners make sure youth leaders have everything they need to be successful, including supplies and organizational or historical knowledge. The adult partners also use guiding questions to help youth leaders work through sticky spots.

Graffiti Walls

Youth used graffiti walls to express what they love about their cities and what they would change.

Workshops in this year’s Youth Delegate Program at NLC’s City Summit conference included skills training on advocacy through the arts and issue workshops on teen dating violence, climate change, gun violence, and pay equity. 

Youth also learned how very diverse groups each have a vested interest in everyday municipal issues and how to advocate for their side of the issue to the community.

Convincing someone of something you don’t personally believe is challenging. Youth stepped into randomly-assigned roles on various sides of an everyday local issue.

In my former role as NLC staff, I had the honor of being the adult partner for this awesome team. I always learn so much from the youth at the conference and on the youth leadership team and have been honored to be part of the team for over five years. At this year’s November conference, I supported new NLC staff to step into the partnership. I am excited to see how the youth voice opportunities at NLC continue to grow under their leadership.