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Since its founding in 2014, JLUSA’s Leadership Training Institute has provided thousands of directly impacted people across the nation with the expertise, skills, and social capital they need to be effective leaders. Today, JLUSA alumni are founding their own organizations, mounting community-based reform campaigns, sitting on boards and commissions, and advising policymakers. We are providing tools and a connection to resources so they can build local power within their own communities.
So far, JLUSA has trained more than 1,800 people from 45 states and Washington, D.C.
JLUSA’s Leadership Training Institute is built upon three pillars:
A cohort-based, 12-month-long advanced leadership training specifically tailored for leaders directly impacted by the criminal justice or youth justice system.
An intensive community-focused training specifically designed for emerging leaders organizing in communities most impacted by marginalization and incarceration.
JLUSA is activating its network of leaders needed to initiate and lead policy reform efforts in their respective communities.
Our #2MillionVoices program–named for the number of people in our nation’s jails and prisons–reaches out to those on the inside and invites them to share with us their thoughts, concerns, recommendations, and solutions.
JLUSA is partnering with the Bard Prison Initiative and College & Community Fellowship on the opening of a tuition-free microcollege housed in the Countee Cullen branch of the New York Public Library in Harlem, New York. It is the nation’s first tuition-free college dedicated to advocacy, arts, and sciences, and its first class of students entered in the fall of 2021.
JLUSA is partnering with The American Institutes for Research (AIR), a behavioral and social science research, evaluation, and technical assistance organization based in Washington, D.C., on its COuRSE (Community Outreach for Resilience, Safety & Equity) Community Change Initiative.
JLUSA serves as a Strategic Ally for the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC). SJC is a five-year, multi-million dollar challenge initiated by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.Its goal is to provide support to local leaders from across the country to tackle what it describes as “one of the greatest drivers of over-incarceration in America—the misuse and overuse of jails." Today, the Challenge Network sites represent 51 cities and counties, across 32 states, that are modeling and inspiring reform.
JLUSA was chosen to serve in the capacity of Strategic Ally. Our partnership with SJC is unique in its focus on the elevation and amplification of directly impacted leaders and is likely the first such partnership in the country.
As a Strategic Ally, JLUSA’s priority is to ensure that directly impacted people and communities have a significant voice in the various local campaigns supported by the SJC. JLUSA organizes in-person panel convenings in each site that include both SJC staff and Leading with Conviction alumni from the area. The panel discusses which issues and concerns to focus on and how to improve the engagement of formerly incarcerated people in planning and implementation.
HIGHLIGHT: BALTIMORE
Baltimore, Maryland is an SJC site and until recently, all decisions about priorities were tightly controlled by the funders, the State’s Attorney, the Police Department, and other systems actors. Baltimore was connected to the SJC to develop a data dashboard to better understand the city’s pretrial detention population. As an SJC Strategic Ally, JLUSA contacted Leading with Conviction alumna Kimberly Haven, the Founder and Executive Director of Forward Justice Maryland, who readily agreed to work with SJC staff. With support from JLUSA, Haven organized an “Impacted Communities Roundtable” to create a space for SJC partners to engage with and learn from directly impacted reform leaders. The event sought to explore what authentic community engagement efforts existed in the city.
From this event, Haven proposed that the Baltimore City Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, which had been defunded by the Governor, be reconstituted. “Partners need to be engaged and talking to one another, and COVID siloed everyone again,” Haven explained. “It’s great that you have law enforcement, prosecutors, defense attorneys and pretrial folks, but they can’t do the work of decarceration or community safety without authentic community organizations sitting at the same table. We all know different things, and if we don’t talk to each other, we don’t have a full picture.”
The reconstituted project is moving forward, and Haven is driving the effort and ensuring that formerly incarcerated leaders and authentic community partner organizations have an equal seat on the Council.
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JustLeadershipUSA is a non-partisan organization. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed belong solely to the individual author or speaker, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the organization.
Since 2014, JustLeadershipUSA has maintained our commitment to ensuring systems-impacted voices are at the forefront of the movement for criminal legal reform, empowering directly impacted leaders in over 45 states with the tools, resources, and connections to transform their work.
Your donation will provide crucial support for our leadership training programs, empowering future generations of leaders and propelling the work of JLUSA and our alumni as we continue to advocate and push reform on issues that matter the most in our communities.
In just 10 years, JLUSA and our network of leaders have worked to dismantle decades of harm caused by the criminal legal system.