Youth Advocacy Foundation, INC
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Mission Statement
Working to ensure equitable access to quality education and to shut down the School-to-Prison Pipeline for all Massachusetts youth.
About This Cause
The Youth Advocacy Foundation (YAF) is the non-profit arm of the Massachusetts juvenile public defenders agency: the Youth Advocacy Division (YAD) within the Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS). For the past sixteen years, we have been working to protect and defend Massachusetts' most vulnerable youth. Some of our key successes include: -Changing how Massachusetts youth interact with the criminal justice system; -Fighting for the establishment of regional juvenile public defender offices in Massachusetts; -Advocating in favor of raising the age to be tried as an adult to eighteen years of age; -Calling attention to the grave injustice that is sentencing juveniles to life without parole. There is an acute relationship between the juvenile justice and education systems. We see, over and over, that when children drop out of the educational system they end up in the court system. That's why the EdLaw Project is one of our key initiatives. The EdLaw Project is a team of lawyers who provide education advocacy to court-involved youth. They also train lawyers, parents, and administrators statewide in expert education advocacy. Since EdLaw's formal inception in January 2000, EdLaw attorneys have directly advocated for the educational rights of over 1800 Massachusetts youth. We have realized, however, that as a small team based in Boston, our impact through direct education advocacy and legal representation will still leave the thousands more systems-involved youth without this crucial resource. Thus, to broaden our impact statewide, we have shifted our focus from providing direct representation to focus on expanding the network of those trained in education advocacy, primarily through training, mentoring, and capacity building. We're changing the standards of the statewide juvenile bar to include education advocacy for the 20-25,000 youth who interact with the court system each year in Massachusetts.