Project

Elevating Youth Voices to Understand the Gaps in Coordination Between School Services and Community-Based Organizations

Young African American man in group therapy

Support for this work was provided by the AIR Opportunity Fund.

In 2019, police arrested 700,000 kids and booked them into jail. For adults, a night in jail can have devastating consequences for them and their families. For kids, even one night in jail can have consequences that are more far reaching. Youth who experience at least one night in jail are more likely to be sent to a juvenile detention facility. The rates of convictions to detention facilities are exponentially higher for Black and Latino/a kids who enter the criminal justice system’s front door. These kids are also more likely to experience sustained disruptions in school, potential expulsion, less academic success, and are far less likely to graduate from high school and go to college. Unfortunately, many of these kids also experience criminal justice involvement as adults.

This project takes a critical step in bridging the gap for some of Wisconsin’s most historically underserved kids and doing so by co-designing the entire project with them. We can conduct research to better serve them, but the goal here really is to empower them, to elevate their voices, and to remind them that they matter.

- Jameela Conway-Turner, Principal Investigator

Keeping kids out of the criminal justice system’s revolving door requires youth-serving systems to understand the context in which kids are living, learn their needs, and to consider how best to help young people thrive. It will also require stronger alignment between organizations who serve youth with justice involvement, such as schools and community-based organizations.

AIR's Approach

This project takes a unique mixed-methods approach to learn more about the needs of young people, but especially underserved Black and Latino/a youth in Wisconsin. We also endeavor to learn how schools and other youth-serving institutions can coordinate for the benefit of kids impacted by the justice system.

We take a participatory approach in this evaluation, partnering with local community-based organizations to build a Youth Research Team exclusively comprised of underserved kids who will co-design the full research process, including survey and interview design, data collection, and analysis with AIR research staff. Together, AIR and the Youth Research Team will:

Uncover the needs of youth ages 14 - 25 in Wisconsin;
Understand the gaps in culturally relevant services between schools and community-based organizations; and
Co-construct culturally responsive program, practice, and policy recommendations that will help young people thrive.

This research will offer lessons for Wisconsin school districts and justice systems serving minority youth across the nation. Most importantly, this project is the first of its kind to co-design a gap analysis with youth. In this way, the research process will not only improve services but will also empower the most impacted youth to build the solutions.