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Youth Justice Narrative Organizing Theory of Change – A Call for Funders

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Research consistently shows true safety stems from ensuring communities have the resources families need to thrive, like safe and affordable housing, family-sustaining jobs, available access to medical and mental health resources, transformative schools with abundant opportunities for youth enrichment and development, and physical spaces that encourage community building, recreation and healthy living. Still, stories that dominate the public imagination about youth crime remain primarily rooted in the idea that policing and punishment make us safe, and such ideas are undergirded by centuries of anti-Black racism that leaves Black, Brown and Indigenous youth particularly susceptible to suspicion, targeted for punishment, and disparately impacted by law and order policies. Today’s “tough-on-crime” narratives truly hold us back from living out a liberatory future where our safety practices are rooted in healing, community abundance, and providing youth and families with the resources they need to thrive. Rejecting oppressive youth crime narratives points towards a more abundant pathway for all of us.

We can win the power needed to proclaim a new vision of anti-racist, healing-centered justice by investing in long-term narrative organizing, focused on building our ability to:

1. Debunk oppressive narratives about youth in the popular imagination;
2. Shape media and culture to change the public conversation on crime and punishment toward healing and community resources;
3. Mobilize people to share new ways of imagining what healing and justice look like for youth and families in their communities and gathering spaces; and
4. Demand that lawmakers act in accordance with their constituencies’ true needs for
   whole communities, not surveillance and prisons.

In our Youth Justice Narrative Organizing Theory of Change, we outline a organizing and strategy framework for building the necessary infrastructure to build narrative power over the long term. We call on funders to dream big and join us in the long-term organizing effort to shift and heal the deep-seated harms of narrative oppression and unlock collective imaginations for a just and liberatory future for us all.