LOUISVILLE FAMILY JUSTICE ADVOCATES INC
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Mission Statement
LFJA creates art, builds knowledge and works to promote healthy and equitable policies for families with incarcerated loved ones in Jefferson County KY
About This Cause
Louisville Family Justice Advocates creates healthy results for children with incarcerated loved ones in our community. Every week since 2008, the Special Project co-creates art activities with children and caregivers to strengthen protective factors and nurture family bonding while they await their video visiting at the Louisville Metro Jail. The Special Project now joins with LFJA to create a more healthy visiting environment and build positive policies and practices for children with incarcerated loved ones in our community. LFJA’s primary target participants are children and families with incarcerated loved ones in the Louisville Metro Jail. This population is historically excluded and often rendered invisible. LFJA seeks to engage Prosecutors, Public Defenders, District Judges and decision makers in Louisville Metro Government as participants in working toward improving conditions in the Visitors Lobby for the children and families. LFJA currently engages 7 art leaders, 14 Board and action leaders and 300 community members in updates, Quarterly Meetings and programs. Over the next 12 months, we aim to grow community participation in LFJA’s activities and advocacy to 1,000, including more formerly incarcerated persons and directly impacted individuals and families, health care providers, artists, advocates and attorneys. LFJA’s primary goal for 2020 is to build a more healthy and supportive environment for children and youth with incarcerated loved ones in the Louisville Metro Jail through the following measurable objectives: 1: With additional training, the art leaders will collect and analyze data during their weekly sessions to assess impact and results. Through the data collected, the children and families will co-create the environment most healthy and supportive for them. 2: Build the capacity of LFJJA Board and art leaders through 8 3-hour sessions of training in the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Results Count framework integrating artmaking for teaching and trust-building. 3. Identify allies within Louisville Metro Department of Corrections, Metro Government and among community leaders, especially those most directly impacted. Together, we can co-create positive and productive public discussions, integrating arts and cultural tools to share information and data, learn from each one other and build civic support for improving the environment and policies for children and youth with incarcerated loved ones in Louisville Metro. Driving new civic dialogues and narratives about jail incarceration as a public health issue for children in our community is the first essential step to for shifting conditions. The dominant narrative of criminal justice as deserved punishment for individual actions is deeply embedded in our community, state and nation. Silence and stigma are the guardians of this narrative, which cloaks the negative impact on affected children. Nationally and locally, health and criminal justice practitioners are working to link incarceration to social and economic conditions, as well as and public health outcomes. The nationally known Human Impact Partners, for example, shows how criminal justice involvement and policies affect determinants of health, behaviors, and physical and mental health outcomes. Metro Louisville’s Center for Health Equity Report for 2017 , recognized criminal justice as a root cause of public health, defining criminal justiceit as “the system that involves police, courts and incarceration and how they are linked together.” The Special Project’s Health Impact Assessment in 2018 documents how parental incarceration is both a root cause and an equity concern. Addressing how criminal justice involvement links to social and economic conditions, as opposed to individual moral failures, is key to the work of LFJA. With capacity-building training, LFJA can begin to fill that gap by building on its strengths. Working with partners and allies, we can develop new forms of data collection and create arts and cultural strategies to show how shifts in community conditions can lead to health equity and wellbeing for children with incarcerated parents. Deeper interactions between the activities leaders and caregivers through the data collection in the visitors lobby may also lead to identifying directly affected family members who want to share their personal stories publicly. Sharing a personal story is a courageous step for anyone directly impacted by incarceration, requiring trust and respect by the listener and the teller. Working in collaboration with the families on the front lines of local incarceration, LFJA can build a strong case that enables local decision makers to better understand how criminal justice relates to the health of our children and how, by working together, we can begin to shift the underlying conditions. The Special Project’s Health Impact Assessment in 2017 and the Louisville Metro Department of Corrections data for 2018 show clear racial inequities among who is incarcerated in our community. As in other cities across our nation, mass incarceration disproportionately affects black males. This means that children of color are significantly and disproportionately affected in Metro Louisville. The public data corresponds to the participant reports of the Special Project Team members during their weekly artmaking sessions. On Sunday night sessions, for example, a time reserved for video visiting with men inside the jail, the participating families are predominantly young mothers of color with children under the age of 5. The Center for Health Equity framework is an invaluable tool for civic discussion and for changing narratives about the systems of power that uphold racism, sexism and other forms of oppression in our city. Combining this framework with arts and cultural strategies is a powerful way to reframe conversations and assumptions about who has power and why. For example, in LFJA’s recently hosted performing artist and juvenile justice expert Hasan Davis of Berea, KY, to perform a “living history” of York: Explorer. York is the too often overlooked enslaved African American who participated in the Lewis and Clark expedition from Louisville to Oregon in the early 1800s. Hasan’s performance was followed by guided small group discussions that included an analysis of the systems of power brought to life in the play. The discussion groups also practiced the Annie E. Casey’s Results Count practice of making personal action commitments. The discussion guides called on the participants inspired by the performance to commit to concrete action steps. Combining data with personal stories are powerful ways of co-creating new equity narratives. Personal stories by of those most directly impacted by incarceration are essential to center equity narratives and to reveal the human impact of local incarceration. Art performances, readings and audio recordings offer options means for directly impacted people to tell their stories, without being publicly identified to create a safer environment for them. Improving the data collection in the visitors lobby is another way of anonymously bringing the voices of those most affected into public discussion, without increasing stigma. LFJA honors diversity, equity and inclusion by being advocates for justice. This advocacy is grounded in historical understanding and current analysis of how unequal systems of power operate in our community, state and nation. Our focus on local mass incarceration means constantly recognizing who is most affected and who benefits from the current deeply inequitable systems. LFJA designs all our strategies and actions to address the deep inequities, as well as current conditions. For LFJA, inclusion is mandatory, not an option. LFJA practices diversity by the numbers: Special Project Team of 7 art leaders comprises LFJA’s paid staff: all 7 are women. 3 are women of color (2 are African American and 1 is Latinx). 4 are white. Ages vary from 23-60, their time on the team ranges from 2 to 8 years. LFJA prioritizes placing those people with direct experience of incarceration on our staff, board and general participation, while honoring that self-identification must be optional. Of the art leaders, 2 self-identify as having incarcerated loved ones, and 1 self identifies as formerly incarcerated. The LFJA Board has 7 members: 6 are female and 1 is male. 3 women are African American. 3 women and 1 man are white. Ages range from early 20s to early 70s. 3 self identify as having incarcerated loved ones, and 1 self identifies as being formerly incarcerated. LFJA creates a culture of belonging through its values and practices. All LFJA communications use “people first” language, honoring our common humanity and not labeling people as “felons” or “inmates,” but as people with felony convictions or currently incarcerated people. LFJA recognizes and uses the power of art to transcend language and experience and create a shared sense of belonging. LFJA provides healthy food and a warm welcome to everyone at all our gatherings. Building capacity among change agents committed to the health of children with incarcerated loved ones is critical to the foundation of LFJA’s work. The next 12-months can result in increased capacity for our art leaders, board and volunteers, and, by extension, our partners and aligned organizations. Acting together, we can develop new competencies in using data, designing programs, forming partnerships and achieving desired and lasting results. This is a critical moment of growth for LFJA as an emerging grassroots health justice organization with a big vision. The Special Project laid the groundwor to achieve our long-term goals. Now LFJA can build our data collection, results-based work and communications. The next 12-months are an opportunity for LFJA to learn, by doing, what our “right size” is, while still achieving significant results for children and families in our community.