The center for Children and Youth Justice is a 501 three nonprofit whose mission is to improve the outcomes for kids and youth who are in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems. Um, and we do that by improving those systems and trying to make them be more research based and data driven with respect to their interventions and relationships with these kids, so that we are focused on the kids themselves. Child centric, I guess, is a way to look at it. And, um, we we accomplished that by, um, by more of a project orientation, I would say. We sort of we look at areas where the results are dismal subpopulations, for example, of juvenile justice and child welfare, where, um, those populations don't seem to be doing well, um, after they have been touched by these systems. In a matter of fact, the systems tend to be a negative experience for them. Um, kids of color, um, LGBTQ kids, girls, um, but that sort of thing. And, um, you know, where can we add value with what we do best? And what I think we do best is bringing people together to learn together how they might change a particular practice or policy and or a process. Since it is a legal process, they might change any of those things and change them in the way they do business with each other. That would improve those outcomes for kids. Now, sometimes that hypothesis that it would, that changing the policy practice process is going to really make things better for kids comes from research. Sometimes somebody else's, sometimes ours, mostly somebody else's or somebody else's experience. Maybe it's a replication of something that happened somewhere else and it, you know, succeeded. Their their numbers showed great, great outcomes for kids. So we all learned together, see whether this could work in this particular environment. And somewhere in the state of Washington, which is is our, our Our territory. And, um, then we help them through, you know, whatever, um, memoranda of understanding, whatever kind of documents they need to come up with to formalize their, their new relationship, their the new thing, they're going to practice. And, um, sometimes that's, you know, writing the policy itself. Sometimes it's not a policy. It's just, you know, how we're going to do business sort of thing. Uh, we then, um, help them. We either come with a grant to do this ourselves, come with funding, or we help to raise the funding, um, altogether. Uh, in order to accomplish this, we then manage them through a pilot, um, either manage or manage an evaluation or do an evaluation. So it's all as, again, data driven. And if we come out with good metrics, whatever those metrics we've decided may be, um, and we have, um, and we've got success. Help them to sustain it. You know, it's not sequential. I mean, this is all kind of happening simultaneously along the way, as I'm sure you appreciate. But, um, then, you know, once that's all buttoned up and it becomes part of the system and the new way of doing business, we look at another aspect, some other population who seems to be underserved or ignored or worse case, um, further traumatized by these experiences, by the experiences in those systems and then, um, and move on to something else. Um, we have one part of our organization, our body of work that is an exception to that rule. And that is, um, a project started out a project, um, now it's a home. It's a home. So at Garvey, at CC, so I assume we would call the program, um, and it's called Lawyers Fostering Independence started with a very small kind of illustrates what we do, but it started with a very small grant from the American Bar Association. Our. Our mandate from that grant was to try to find ways to engage lawyers in something that would help young people who were aging out of the foster care system to not have the rotten outcomes that that they were experiencing. For example, um, compared to their non foster age group, they were more, more likely to be homeless by some four times, more likely not to be employed, more likely not to be in school, more likely to have unaddressed mental health issues. The beat goes on. More likely to be parents with no support. Um, all of these really bad outcomes that, you know, just set their life on a path which is not successful. And, um, so that was our mandate. Find something that lawyers could do that would help turn those bad statistics around. And so we brought stakeholders together. Also talked to and one of another part of our M.O. at KCI is we bring the voices of the youth themselves, usually veteran youth. I mean, the young adults talk to us about their experience and offer up recommendations for what could have made their life different. So we bring youth to the table. How might this change? Etc. and we came up with the idea of a pro bono legal service where we would recruit and train, um, and hopefully, um, do whatever we needed to do to retain, um, a group of lawyers who would agree to do volunteer legal services, civil legal services, not criminal civil legal services for young people who were aging out, um, young people between we decided 17 and 25. Um, that was before all the brain science told us. That was exactly what what that that those key those key years are Ah. And, um, so that's what we did. And, um, we tested it out for a period of a year, and we, we, you know, we we were successful because we were we resolved housing issues. We were able to get a nice group of referrals. We were, um, um, we educated social workers and social service agencies around the area. This was limited to King County at the time. And um, our test group, if you will. And um, so we had a good group. We had reason to believe that there were there were a lot more out there that we weren't serving. So the need was great. We were we were filling a need and um, and, uh, we were, we were seeing successes. So, um, we then decided, all right, great. Now our model says you now go around to the system and plug it in. Right. Sustain it in the system somewhere. Well, that wouldn't mean you'd go to the Department of Social and Health Services. In this instance, you would go to other civil legal aid agencies who do that solely for for a business and see, you know, here here's the model that we have. You want to take it. Nobody wanted to take it unless we were going to raise the money to do it. And so I said to myself, well, if I have to raise money to sustain this program, I might as well keep it here. And, um, and we also learned and this was the, you know, sort of the more positive side of that, um, as, as opposed to the entrepreneurial. But, um, and that was our lawyers really liked the idea that they were engaged with, with a group, to wit, CCJ that was doing other things, um, in the area of child welfare and juvenile justice and wasn't just a lawyers organization that we really were looking at reform of legal of two legal systems for sure, but that we were in doing it, um, with staff. That was not all lawyers. We were doing it on not just the purely, purely the court system, but but other aspects of these systems. And so they thought that was cool to be a part of that kind of an endeavor rather than to go with, you know, um, Volunteer Legal Services Inc. and, um, and so we have it's been remarkably successful. I think we are now, I should know this by heart, but I don't I think we are about year 8 or 9 and we are we are now, um, expanded to Snohomish County probably later this year will be in Pierce County. Um, and we know that we need to go to the east side because the, the east side, meaning the east side of the mountains, um, because there is need there as well. I mean, obviously the largest population chunk is here, and so we still have that, but we have we served over 200 young people. Last year was a was a record year. And we do legal clinics. We've added that as part of the part of the picture, in addition to just referrals, we've added many more social service agency partners who whose staff are trained by us, you know, and to how to identify something that might be a legal issue, um, which is really important in that kind of work because, you know, it's the hammer and nail sort of thing. Um, um, a social worker hears of a kid or hears a kid explain to them that they're about to get evicted from their apartment. Their first impulse is to find them another apartment or find them a stable place to live. Our first impulse is to keep them in the apartment and say, why is he being evicted? You know, does the does the landlord have real grounds? Um, you know, etc.. And so, you know, maybe the legal fix is a more permanent one than, than having the poor social worker have to keep finding new places for this young person to live. And while he's he or she is unstable, he housed for, you know, very long periods of time, thus stopping everything dead, you know, can't go to school, can't keep a job because he's not stably housed. So, um, anyway, it's been a it's been a great, um, great success. And, um, but it's but it's the, um, the exception to the rule. Other things, um, like supporting early connections, which is a model. And I won't spare the details here, but, um, the a model, a new way of handling cases in the child welfare system, which involve little kids from zero plus one day to ages to age three. And, um, in a more therapeutic kind of a, like a drug court environment as opposed to an adversarial environment. And, um, where where there's a decision making team, even though the judge may be at the head of that team, um, you still have, um, people that are that are giving input from the various disciplines, from the various agencies, in addition to the lawyers, etc. and, um, that is now embedded in, in King County and um, um, is successful. We have not yet moved at any place else in the state, but, you know, we sure would like to, but, um, yeah, that's kind of that's our M.O., as I said, that we once we, um, prove something up, we'll put it in and try to put it into the system and be adopted that way.
