All Youth Are Sacred Travels Across the State

The All Youth Are Sacred (AYAS) statewide fellowship and CJCJ collaboration has continued with events in the Central Valley. These events showcased CJCJ’s archive of historic materials from California’s youth prisons, including California Youth Authority (CYA) and Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) photographs while supporting youth leadership, and local community work surrounding youth justice. 

This fall season, we held events in Sacramento and Fresno, CA. Both events were titled ​“Wards of the State: Who Gets to Be Kids? The Silenced Stories of our Youth” and were organized and ran by AYAS fellows, with additional support from local organizations on the ground. We also highlighted statewide and region specific juvenile justice data for each event. 

For our Sacramento event, AYAS partnered with Sol Collective to use their beautiful community space. Partners from local organizations such as the Anti-Recidivism Coalition (ARC) and Sacramento Area Youth Speaks (SAYS) spoke about their efforts on the ground, and provided us with art performances. We also called upon our talent within AYAS and supporting organizations and closed with poetry read by AYAS team members Ceci McLellan and Tina Curiel.

This beautiful event was multi-generational, youth led, and community supported. Thank you to all the speakers and organizers for such a powerful event. Keep scrolling for photos of the event. 

For their next event, AYAS fellows took their exhibit and focus on local and statewide youth justice data and work to Fresno, CA. Partnering with several community organizations, we were lucky to also have former Next Generation Fellowship (NGF) fellow and local Fresno artist Mathew Ponce (aka Remainder Inners) as our host for the event. 

We know that community and culture is the medicine that our young people need in their life, not systems of punishment and surveillance. Holding culture and generational healing as values was a focus for the Fresno event, with partners from the Chicano Youth Center, Brown Issues, and more supporting the entire day. We are pleased to report we hosted over 80 people for this event! From generational indigenous dancers and drummers holding space for us, to performances by local youth and AYAS fellows, the event was filled with community and people power. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this space to make it as welcoming, informative, and engaging as it was. Please see below for photos. More photos of both events can also be found on our Instagram page.

We are also very encouraged to see how community interacts with our archive material. We are still living with the consequences of California’s youth prison systems, and working on uplifting the opportunities given with the closer of the DJJ last year. For more information on the timeline of California’s youth prison system, check out our research and publications.

AYAS is a narrative power building initiative that addresses the way we discuss and approach youth incarceration. This fellowship is spearheaded by the California Alliance for Youth and Community Justice (CAYC), of which CJCJ is a member. AYAS is the result of long-term alliance efforts to work on narrative and youth justice efforts, while also investing in youth leadership. CJCJ is proud to be an anchor org of the AYAS fellowship. Our data and research on youth incarceration in California, as well as our historic archive materials on California’s youth prisons are a core part of the fellowship and its traveling events. Please follow AYAS on social media here.

To see more coverage of our events, make sure you follow CJCJ on Instagram, Facebook, and X.