STRATEGIES FOR YOUTH INC
This organization has already been registered
Someone in your organization has already registered and setup an account. would you like to join their team?Profile owner : l*t@s****************h.o*g
Mission Statement
The mission of Strategies for Youth is to improve relations between police and youth, particularly youth of color, to reduce the numbers of young people who are arrested, particularly for relatively minor offenses, and, to pursue systemic changes to the way that police are recruited, trained, supervised, and evaluated. Our long-term vision is for police to practice a trauma-informed, developmentally-appropriate orientation to youth, whereby arrest is used as a last resort, only when public safety is endangered, and police work in concert with community groups to strengthen the overall network of support for vulnerable youth. We pursue this mission using four mutually reinforcing core strategies: 1. Training law enforcement through our two-day Policing the Teen Brain trainings, which teach police about adolescent psychology and the effects of trauma and poverty on young people’s behaviors and attitudes, and how to defuse, rather than exacerbate, encounters with youth. Each training is preceded, informed, and adjusted by an assessment of departments’ current treatment of youth and by an audit of community-based organizations that can form partnerships and offer alternatives to arrest for young people. These organizations are introduced to the police on the second day of training and time is set aside for informal networking to take place between them. Additionally: a. SFY offers a version of the training titled, Policing the Teen Brain in School for School Resource Officers (SRO) who are deployed in schools. This training offers information about education law, and teaches strategies for integrating the role of the SRO with an educational mission. b. SFY has developed the In the Presence of Children training for law enforcement agencies. This training, following SFY’s report First, Do No Harm: Model Practices for Law Enforcement Agencies when Arresting Parents in the Presence of Children, for the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs, teaches officers how to mitigate the harm of children observing the arrest of a parent/caretaker. 2. Creating law enforcement agency policies and practices that reflect a developmentally appropriate, trauma-informed, and equitable approach to policing youth. For example, SFY, working with the Cleveland Department of Police and the U.S. Department of Justice under Loretta Lynch, developed a comprehensive set of model law enforcement agency policies and practices. SFY now promotes this model policy and urges its adoption with all agencies. Many agencies have no policies; others have outdated ones that ignore key issues affecting youth, such as those related to LGBTQ and commercial sexually exploited children. 3. Teaching youth, aged 11-19, through the Juvenile Justice Jeopardy game, how to navigate interactions with their peers, police, and authority figures, use social emotional skills to withstand provocations and impulses to flee/escalate, and to understand the legal consequences of their conduct. We focus on reaching youth, particularly youth of color, at high risk of arrest and/or violence in their encounters with police. We have recently developed a version focused on helping young people identify and manage the trauma that can lead to arrest and violence, and are planning to develop one specifically for girls. Girls’ path through the criminal justice system is different from boys, and this version of the game will focus on the behaviors and the laws that may push them unnecessarily into the juvenile justice system. 4. Conducting original research for policy reports designed to heighten public awareness of structural issues in policing in need of reform, and to equip advocates and legislators to promote evidence-based reforms and improvements. For instance, after the Richland, South Carolina school sheriff’s deputy abuse of a female student who did not want to part with her cell phone, SFY created the Parents’ Checklist for SROs to help parents be aware of the risks their children face in school. Since 2010, when SFY started with a single contract for $22,000, SFY has grown in 2018, to a budget of $850,000, 65% comprised of government contracts and 35% supported by foundations and individual donors.
About This Cause
Organizational Mission and History History: In 1998, Lisa Thurau was working as the Policy Director for the Juvenile Justice Center at Suffolk University in Boston. The Boston Transit Police implemented a “zero tolerance” policy for students who used public transit to get to school. This policy led to the arrest of 646 youth in 1999; 80% for disorderly conduct or trespassing—behavior such as waiting at a station; 95% were youth of color; 85% of the charges were dropped. Lisa discovered that the MBTA Police had no standards or training to guide officers’ interactions with youth. She decided to sue and was particularly disturbed when an attorney for the Transit Police vowed to “destroy” the children on the stand. It struck her as profoundly misguided that an attorney would view traumatized children as a legal foe, and she recognized that deep, structural and systemic change was needed to reorient the way in which police treated young people, particularly economically disadvantaged young people of color. After settling the lawsuit with the Transit Police, Lisa negotiated with the new Chief to offer all Transit Police a training with an adolescent psychiatrist and rewrote their policies to reflect current knowledge about adolescent development and effects of trauma on behavior. Arrests fell from 646 to 84 in 2009 and kept below 100 every year until 2014, when the number of youth using public transit increased as a result of new Boston Public Schools transportation polices for middle school students. As a result of this experience, she decided to form a non-profit organization—Strategies for Youth (SFY)--dedicated exclusively to improving relationships between police and youth, to reducing unnecessary arrests of young people, and to reducing disproportionate minority contact (DMC). SFY’s long-term vision is for police to work in concert with community-based organizations and families to support vulnerable youth and to use arrest as a last resort. We offer four distinct, but interrelated services: (1) training law enforcement officers to use developmentally-appropriate, trauma-informed approaches to policing youth; (2) educating youth about the law, school codes of conduct, and strategies for managing triggers for trauma and stress so that they can keep their encounters with police and other authority figures peaceful and respectful; (3) providing technical assistance to help law enforcement agencies rewrite policies and standards governing police and agency interactions with youth; and (4) advocating for system-wide changes and cultural shifts to the policing of youth in this country. We were recently recognized as a “high performing nonprofit organization” by the Social Innovation Forum of Massachusetts. SFY has grown into the only national organization with the sole goal of improving police/youth interactions, preventing violence, reducing disproportionate minority confinement and preventing unnecessary arrests of youth. It currently works in 19 states, and has an annual budget of over $800,000. In 2017, SFY was designated a “high performing” organization for the “Breaking the Cycle of Incarceration” track of the Massachusetts Social Innovation Forum. SFY has recently been cited in, among others, the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Crime Report, Youth Today, Education Week, NPR, CNN, and MSNBC. We are also working to expand our communications capacity, and to more regularly publish op eds, articles and other commentary on issues central to our mission. Partners and Collaborators SFY is highly collaborative. We have partnered with the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative operating in over 300 sites across the U.S. As states across the country aim to reduce the use of incarceration of youth, SFY’s has worked with law enforcement agencies to explain the value of reducing the use of detention and the importance of improving police/youth relationships instead. SFY also routinely partners with youth-serving community-based organizations (YSCBOs) across the nation, including the Boys & Girls Clubs, and YMCAs to provide our Juvenile Justice Jeopardy games. Partnering with YSCBOs is a key feature of SFY’s efforts to improve the social safety net for youth, in lieu of arrest. SFY also works with stakeholders of juvenile justice and school systems at the local and national level. When we conduct an assessment prior to offering a Policing the Teen Brain training, or when we develop a Juvenile Justice Jeopardy game, we involve these stakeholders in the development process. We often collaborate with the National Juvenile Defender Center and regional groups of defenders who ask SFY to speak at conferences. Advocacy groups with whom we work include: Moms Rising (which has translated our Parents’ Checklist for School Resource Officers into Spanish), various state chapters of Justice for Families, the Police Foundation, National Alliance on Mental Illness, the ACLU, the national Coalition for Juvenile Justice, the National Juvenile Justice Network, the Communities for Just Schools Fund, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. SFY frequently partners with the National Police Accountability Project (NPAP) to assist lawyers suing on behalf of youth who have been hurt by police. SFY provides legal strategy, psychological experts, and has created networking opportunities between NPAP attorneys and youth advocates nationwide. SFY works with several statewide and regional children’s law centers, too, often consulting on legislation or speaking at conferences. Under President Obama, SFY worked frequently with the U.S. Department of Justice, specifically the Office of Special Litigation. This Office frequently consulted with SFY and then adopted some of our recommendations about conducting investigations of police to include youth, a group that had been routinely excluded from consideration, remarkably, in cities including Cleveland and Ferguson. The first city that fully included youth in its investigation was Baltimore in 2016. SFY also worked with attorneys from the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education to address the need for guidance in defining and limiting the role of school resource officers and providing legal advice on statements of interest issued by the Department in pending lawsuits.