Initiatives

National Community Asset Map

Sites of Love, Healing, and Accountability

This map spotlights community organizations that embrace youth involved in the delinquency system. This map is crowdsourced by youth defense advocates across the country and offers a living directory of community-based alternatives to incarceration and surveillance. Our hope is to bring light to community sites of love, healing, and accountability so that youth defenders can build bridges to communities from inside the legal system, offering young people pathways to grow and thrive in communities of care. This map is an effort to grow our collective power by weaving advocates together and strengthening our connective fibers as we build toward a future where all youth are free to thrive in caring communities.

User Note

This map consists of community organizations that 1) offer services for youth actively involved in the delinquency system, 2) are open to receive referrals from defense teams, and 3) have been recommended by a youth defense advocate or community partner. While the Gault Center has verified that each organization meets the criteria listed above, please contact the organizations directly to discuss fit and alignment for each youth's specific situation, needs, and interests. 

If you would like to submit an organization to our National Community Asset Map, please contact us.  

Relatedly, please check out the National Participatory Defense Network  for a list of community-based participatory defense hubs to partner in youth defense advocacy.  

An Illustration

Imagine you are standing on the edge of a river. And in that river, you see children drowning.  

And then you look up the river, and you see a boat. And on that boat, you see people throwing children off the boat to drown in the river.  

And then you look further upstream at the land adjoining the river. And on the land, you see people capturing children to put them on the boat to throw them into the river. 

In this river, systems churn to drown children.   

But here is what is also happening.  

Downstream, people are pulling children out of the river. Midstream, people on the boat are stopping children from being thrown into the river. Upstream, people are working to prevent children from being captured.  

Equally important are the people downstream, midstream, and upstream—even better if we work together. Together, we can do the immediate necessary work at hand while imagining, experimenting, and building different ways we can co-exist, interdependently, to embrace the beautiful possibilities that arise when children are supported in caring communities. 

This, to us, is the power of collectivity. And this map is a tangible reflection of the connective fibers that hold us together—the people downstream, midstream, and upstream—working toward the same horizon.  

This illustration is a loose adaptation of a passage in Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira.