Why Youth Advocacy

Since 2008, Juvenile Law Center’s Youth Advocacy Program has evolved into a national model for deliberate, inclusive curriculum, community engagement, and advocacy because of the consistent feedback and expertise of the teens and young adults it serves.

Every year the program changes to better address the needs of the youth advocates both inside and outside of the program, and to ensure their advocacy work is driven by their lived experience and expertise.

One of the most important changes the program has made in alignment with the goals of Juvenile Law Center is to explicitly and thoughtfully center race in both the programming support for the youth advocates and the campaigns the youth advocates develop. Many of these changes have been driven by feedback from members of Youth Fostering Change and Juveniles for Justice.

Every component in this guide is influenced by years of collaboration with young people in Philadelphia. The Youth Advocacy Program at Juvenile Law Center has been so successful in engaging young people and making systemic changes in the foster care and juvenile justice systems because of our youth-centered approach and our willingness to adapt to meet our young members where they are when they enter and continue through the program. These components have been defined by policies that best support the fluid and sometimes unstable realities our youth advocates are experiencing AND by humbly asking for direction from our youth advocates when the program does not seem to be working for them and then involving them in the change process.
 

For all Youth Advocate Reflections sections in the toolkit, youth advocates from Advocates for Youth Justice and Advocates Transforming Youth System were given background on the guiding principles, were asked a series of questions about those principles, and were prompted to think of an example of how those themes played out in the program. These questions were asked in focus-group settings. Their feedback was compiled by interns in a collective voice.
In addition to the small focus groups with current members, the content in this toolkit was reviewed by the 2021-2022 Youth Advocacy Program Alumni Fellow. This fellowship is designed specifically for individuals who completed their three years in the program, remained an active alumnus in the Youth Speakers Bureau, and expressed an interest in participating in the development and facilitation of the Youth Advocacy Program. Crucial feedback was given and implemented about the type of emergency support youth advocates are given, additional details about the issue selection process, and how specifically racial biases and issues of equity have been fleshed out over the past few years.