CAYCJ Member Organizations
All of Us or None is a grassroots civil and human rights organization fighting for the rights of formerly-and currently-incarcerated people and our families. We are fighting against the discrimination that people face every day because of arrest or conviction history. The goal of All of Us or None is to strengthen the voices of people most affected by mass incarceration and the growth of the prison-industrial complex. Through our grassroots organizing, we are building a powerful political movement to win full restoration of our human and civil rights.
The Alliance for Boys and Men of Color (ABMoC) is a network of more than 200 advocacy organizations and community leaders who come together to advance race and gender justice by expanding opportunity and transforming state and local policies that are failing boys and men of color, their families and communities. Since our founding eight years ago, we've passed more than 100 bills in the CA legislature and won policy change in countless cities and counties statewide.
Building community through relationships based on LOVE, FAITH, and COMPASSION.
The Anti-Recidivism Coalition (ARC) works to end mass incarceration in California. To ensure our communities are safe, healthy, and whole, ARC empowers formerly and currently incarcerated people to thrive by providing a support network, comprehensive reentry services, and opportunities to advocate for policy change. Through our grassroots policy advocacy, we are dedicated to transforming the criminal justice system so that it is more just and equitable for all people.
The mission of the Asian Prisoner Support Committee (APSC) is to provide direct support to Asian and Pacific Islander (API) prisoners and to raise awareness about the growing number of APIs being imprisoned, detained, and deported.
The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ) is a nonprofit nonpartisan organization whose mission is to reduce society’s reliance on incarceration as a solution to social problems. In pursuit of this mission, CJCJ provides direct services, technical assistance, and policy analysis that work in unison to promote a balanced and humane criminal justice system designed to reduce incarceration and enhance long-term public safety.
Ceres Policy Research advances youth and community well-being through strategic research and planning. We use a healing-informed approach to build alternatives to the justice system, exclusionary school discipline, the criminalization of immigration, and other state interventions. Our work aims to end the punishment of people due to race, immigration status, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation.
Children's Defense Fund – California is the western regional office of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), a national child advocacy organization that has worked relentlessly over 40 years to ensure a level playing field for all children. Founded Marian Wright Edelman in 1973, CDF champion policies and programs that lift children out of poverty; protect them from abuse and neglect; and ensure their access to health care, quality education, and a moral and spiritual foundation. Supported by foundation and corporate grants and individual donations, CDF advocates nationwide on behalf of children to ensure children are always a priority.
Club Stride is a youth empowerment organization that is responding to an unparalleled call for civic renewal that is critical to ensure the future economic health of every community.
Our team is full of community leaders, dedicated to the mission of creating immediate and lasting change in the lives of those in need. Our work with donors and partners is aimed at achieving a more just society. Join us in our fight by learning more about our mission and supporting our causes!
We are a program of the W. Haywood Burns Institute that promotes the availability of effective, culturally appropriate interventions to detention and incarceration. The Community Justice Network for Youth (CJNY) is committed to the empowerment of children, youth, families and communities that are being served by governmental systems by promoting the availability of effective, culturally appropriate interventions for youth in poor communities, particularly communities of color. The network will identify, promote and help expand the work and capacities of effective community based organizations that provide interventions to children in trouble with the law. CJNY works to develop and expand local, state and national networks of community-based providers committed to youth of color so that community-based agencies can effectively influence public policy that now often adversely impacts youth of color.
CURYJ (pronounced 'courage') unlocks the leadership of young people to dream beyond bars. We look to young people to lead the way in transforming our communities by investing in their healing, aspirations, and activism.
Silicon Valley De-Bug is a community organizing, advocacy, and a multimedia storytelling organization based out of San José, California. Since its inception in 2001, De-Bug has been a platform for Silicon Valley's diverse communities to impact the political, cultural, and social landscape of the region, while also becoming a nationally recognized model for community-based justice work.
We are named after Ella Baker, a brilliant, Black hero of the civil rights movement. Following in her footsteps, we organize with Black, Brown, and low-income people to shift resources away from prisons and punishment, and towards opportunities that make our communities safe, healthy, and strong. For twenty-five years, we’ve been working to advance people-powered campaigns for racial and economic justice – and we are winning!
Founded in 2000, Fresh Lifelines for Youth (FLY) is an award-winning nonprofit serving Bay Area youth impacted by the juvenile justice system. Our programs connect young people with positive mentors and role models, promote their understanding of the law and their rights, and support them to become leaders among their peers and in their communities. Together with our young people, we also help our juvenile justice systems become more just, humane, and equitable. As a result, FLY increases safety and decreases the costs and consequences of crime.
Fresno Barrios Unidos provides unconditional support, love and guidance for youth, young adults and their families in Fresno. Our community, like California, is changing fast, and we believe our youth must be at the forefront of creating the world of their dreams. We meet people where they are and follow their lead to help them be healthy, hopeful and engaged in creating communities that foster our individual and collective wellbeing.
The W. Haywood Burns Institute (BI) is a black-led national, non-profit with a diverse team of bold visionaries, working to transform the administration of justice. Always challenging racial hierarchy and the social control of communities of color by the justice sector and other public systems, BI employs strategies and tactics to establish a community centered approach of justice administration that is anchored in structural well-being.
Hoops 4 Justice is a non-profit organization that provides life skills training to incarcerated youth through sports and a credible messenger model. The organization was founded by Rosalino Pavia, Ronnie Villeda, Ilana Parach, and Sho Wantanabe, who are dedicated to empowering and uplifting young people impacted by the criminal justice system.
Human Rights Watch investigates and reports on abuses happening in all corners of the world. We are roughly 550 plus people of 70-plus nationalities who are country experts, lawyers, journalists, and others who work to protect the most at risk, from vulnerable minorities and civilians in wartime, to refugees and children in need. We direct our advocacy towards governments, armed groups and businesses, pushing them to change or enforce their laws, policies and practices. To ensure our independence, we refuse government funding and carefully review all donations to ensure that they are consistent with our policies, mission, and values. We partner with organizations large and small across the globe to protect embattled activists and to help hold abusers to account and bring justice to victims.
The Humboldt County Transition-Age Youth Collaboration (HCTAYC) is a youth advocacy and leadership development organization dedicated to empowering young people with lived experience to transform the foster care, juvenile justice, mental health and homelessness services systems.
Impact Justice is a national innovation and research center advancing new ideas and solutions for justice reform. Impact Justice was founded in 2015 on an idea: to create an organization that would imagine, innovate, and accept absolutely nothing about the status quo of our current justice system. We know the problems: too many people locked up, including far too many people of color; families broken up and broken by our justice system; and a culture that too often treats people based on fear, oppression, and bias. For us to build the future we need, we must build the world we want today.
The Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) is a national nonprofit resource center that provides immigration legal training, technical assistance, and educational materials, and engages in advocacy and immigrant civic engagement to advance immigrant rights.
LSPC organizes communities impacted by the criminal justice system and advocates to release incarcerated people, to restore human and civil rights, and to reunify families and communities. We build public awareness of structural racism in policing, the courts, and the prison system, and we advance racial and gender justice in all our work.
MILPA Collective (MILPA) is, first and foremost, a movement space designed for, and led by, formerly incarcerated and system-impacted individuals. We are committed to supporting next-generation infrastructure and leadership within communities, organizations, and systems. We center cultural healing, racial equity and LOVE in our practices and advocacy.
The National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) works to reduce incarceration and violence, improve the outcomes of system-involved youth and adults, and increase the capacity and expertise of the organizations that serve these individuals. NICJR provides technical assistance, consulting, research, organizational development, and advocacy in the fields of juvenile and criminal justice, youth development, and violence prevention. NICJR works with an array of organizations, including government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and philanthropic foundations.
The mission of the National Compadres Network is to strengthen and re-root the capacity of individuals, families, and communities to honor, rebalance, and redevelop the authentic identity, values, traditions, and indigenous practices of Chicano, Latino, Native, Raza, and other communities of color as the path to the honoring of all their relations and lifelong well-being. The National Compadres Network believes re-rooting the generational extended kinship Compadre/Comadre network will have an impact on reducing the incidence of substance abuse, domestic violence, child abuse, teen pregnancy, gang violence, heterosexism, racial inequity, and other individual, family, community and societal issues.
National Center for Youth Law believes in the incredible power, agency and wisdom of youth. Driven by their voices and experiences, we have worked for more than 50 years to transform government agencies and public systems, so that they Center Youth with equity, dignity and care. Our work has led to foundational shifts in policy and standards of practices in communities and states nationwide.
Pacific Juvenile Defender Center provides support to juvenile trial lawyers, appellate counsel, law school clinical programs, and nonprofit law centers to ensure quality representation for children throughout California.
Our Goal: Freedom from State and Neighborhood Violence We believe that criminal violence is so closely tied to the violence of policing and incarceration that one cannot be treated without the other.
Dedicated to addressing the disproportionate impact of the criminal and juvenile justice systems on indigenous peoples throughout Northern California.
At RYSE, we are building a community that inspires and empowers young people to love, learn, educate, heal, and transform lives and communities.
The Safe Return Team is a group of formerly incarcerated Richmond residents working to strengthen the relationship of people coming home from incarceration with the broader community.
Since 1998, SBX Youth & Family Services has provided services in the Inland Empire to youth and their families. SBX began at Rialto High School in 1998 by a teacher – Ernest Rhone IV alongside a group of high school students. Together, they set out to develop future professional leaders under the principles of wisdom, brotherhood, sisterhood, service, endurance, excellence, and unity. Today, SBX is still led by the same teacher and high school students working towards the same goals and mission – to develop young people, serve families in the Inland Empire, and break the cycle of poverty and violence. So it is said, so it is done.
SCBU mission is to promote multicultural social justice, nonviolence, and economic equity through cultural healing, civic leadership, and community development.
Urban Peace Movement (UPM) builds youth leadership in Oakland to transform the culture and social conditions that lead to community violence & mass incarceration in communities of color. UPM’s model of “Healing-Centered Youth Organizing” supports young people to feel self-confident & hopeful while empowering them to work for healing, social justice, and a brighter future for all!!
The Youth Law Center advocates to transform foster care and juvenile justice systems across the nation so every child and youth can thrive.
Underground GRIT provides a voice to men, women, and youth who been system impacted and who are breaking cycles perpetuated by trauma. Through our personal and professional experiences, we recognize the gaps in our system, and the needs of our most vulnerable individuals and families. We realize the importance of working with each member to create independent, empowering care solutions that fits their unique needs.
YWFC strives to build the power and leadership of directly impacted young people and inspire them to create positive change in their lives and communities. We meet young people where they’re at: on the streets, in jails and detention centers, and in the neighborhoods and communities where we live. Together, we build our personal and collective power, heal from trauma, advocate on behalf of ourselves and each other, and gain access to education and work to transform the conditions, systems, and policies that lead to intergenerational cycles of violence, incarceration, and poverty.
Since 1991, as mentors, youth leaders, counselors, case managers, intervention specialists and violence interrupters, we at Youth ALIVE! have worked to help violently wounded people heal themselves and their community. Our mission is to prevent violence and create young leaders. We believe that young people growing up and going to school in the city’s most violent neighborhoods, possess the power to change the city for the better. We meet our clients where they are, at home, in school, at the hospital bedsides of young shooting victims, on the streets of our most dangerous neighborhoods.
The Youth Justice Coalition (YJC) is working to build a youth, family, and formerly and currently incarcerated people’s movement to challenge America’s addiction to incarceration and race, gender and class discrimination in Los Angeles County’s, California’s and the nation’s juvenile and criminal injustice systems.
Fighting to create a San Diego where every young person has everything they need to be happy, healthy, and prepared to reach their potential. We offer access to opportunities – especially to low income and disadvantaged youth – to succeed and thrive. Youth will build the power needed to create modern change. Youth will work side-by-side and collaborate with adult allies to improve the youth development ecosystem. Youth will demand prioritization from leaders and decision-makers of their community.
We at Youth Forward are dedicated to improving the health, education, and wellbeing of our most vulnerable children and youth through youth leadership development, policy advocacy, education and community action. We advocate for policy and systems changes that increase investments in children and youth and that reduce the criminalization of young people. In addition to its own policy work, Youth Forward assists other organizations with strategic support in the areas of youth organizing, policy research, and organizational development.