YOUTH REPRESENT INC
11 Park Place 1512, New York, NY 10007 youthrepresent.org

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Organizations Filed Purposes: To ensure that young people affected by the criminal justice system are afforded every opportunity to reclaim lives of dignity, self-fulfillment, and engagement in their communities. We are dedicated to improving the lives and futures of young people affected by the criminal justice system. A conviction, an arrest, or even a simple interaction with police can have lasting consequences for young people, threatening the stability they need to thrive. When our justice system creates barriers to success for youth, we use the law to help them leave the stigma of a criminal record behind. The results of the mass criminalization of young people of color serve as potentially lifelong impediments to the cornerstones of stability we all need. Youth Represent provides critical legal reentry services and education for young people, and we do so in their own communities. We also use the law to advocate for broader changes to the criminal legal system, and other systems that affect the young people

Ensure that young people affected by the criminal justice system are afforded every opportunity to reclaim lives of dignity, self-fulfillment, and engagement in their communities.

Community-Lawyering: Youth Represent served 812 youth by providing direct legal representation and advice; we educated 1,689 through 122 Know Your Rights workshops. We worked on 311 cases in employment, housing, education, family, and criminal law, and reviewed criminal histories for 364 youth so they could have an accurate understanding of what will appear on background checks. We brought this model to a host of workforce development programs, alternatives-to-incarceration, mental health clinics, and shelters for LGBTQ and trans- and gender-nonconforming youth. In addition to these direct service numbers, we also greatly expanded our litigation efforts, filing class action and impact litigation cases against major NYC employers to combat the discriminatory practices they apply when hiring applicants with criminal histories and applicants of color.

Policy Reform: Since the passage of landmark Raise the Age legislation in 2017, raising the age of adult prosecution to 18 years old in New York, Youth Represent has maintained a dual focus, simultaneously ensuring the full implementation of the law in a way that benefits as many young people as possible and advancing a broader youth justice policy agenda for New York State and City. We also train system involved youth in advocacy and public speaking skills through our Youth Speakers Institute. (continued on Schedule O)

The Youth Speakers Institute trains system-involved young people to be advocates in their own right. The ten-week curriculum includes writing and storytelling skills development, media training, advocacy training, and how a bill becomes a law. We then connect young people with speaking engagements and advocacy opportunities as part of larger reform efforts, and provide ongoing support and training. In 2019, ten young people graduated from the program, and we connected them and dozens of YSI alumni with opportunities to effect change in their communities.

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Data for this page was sourced from XML published by IRS (public 990 form dataset) from: https://s3.amazonaws.com/irs-form-990/202042809349300829_public.xml