Legal Advocacy

Hope Pipeline: Disrupting the School to Prison Pipeline  

We want to make sure that youth who have contact with the juvenile justice system have the support they need to get through the system and to stay out of it.

Together, we make sure each child has supports and services at home, at school, and in the community to support learning and engagement.

We recognize our shared obligation to the children of our community. By strengthening our school district, we are living up to our duty to make our city a place where all children can grow, thrive, and become responsible citizens themselves.

Our RRYHTS-respecting approach:

• Resilience promoting: We engage in a process that brings out a youth’s strengths and increases access to psychological, social, political, economic, and environmental resources to help that youth succeed, no matter their life circumstances. We also work to build systems  that nurture our community youths’ resilience.
• Restorative: Our advocacy focus on nonviolent communication; building empathy with others; and empowering youth to take responsibility for their actions and recognize the impact of their actions on others.
• Youth centered: We elevate youth leadership and expertise; engage them as partners, recognizing that they need to be a part of any decisions made; and empower youth to design and drive solutions in their own lives and in our community.
• Healing centered: We recognize the impact of trauma, including adverse childhood experiences as well as experiences of structural racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, and support healing for every youth so that they may become active leaders for inclusion and safety in our community.
• Team building: We know that every youth need a team around them. We respond holistically to youth’s legal services through a multidisciplinary team.
• Strengths-based: We focus on the things each youth (and their family) are good at, the potential they have to grow existing strengths, and their capacity to build new ones.

Our region’s most important resource is the potential of our children. When we stand up for the well-being of our children and young people, we stand for our investment in their ability to contribute to our community today.

We believe in the importance of intentional and integrated legal advocacy.

We believe that effective children’s advocacy requires us to recognize patterns impacting kids and to implement collaborative solutions. We design targeted legal advocacy projects so that we can help each kid who needs us but also support that community system to get back on track for kids’ well-being.

For our community to become all we know it can be, we must ensure that our community’s stakeholders work together so that our children have the opportunity to learn and develop. That means our advocacy has to build and strengthen our community’s collective responsibility for kids and their well-being.