Zellerbach Family Foundation

This week, the California Child Welfare Co-Investment Partnership released a summary of their recent research and analysis efforts, entitled “Crossover Youth: A Shared Responsibility.” The first two sections of the report begin with two statistics on California youth: first, “there were 496,972 reports of [child] neglect and abuse in 2014, with 81,391 substantiated,” and second, “there were 101,531 young people referred to juvenile probation in 2014.”

On Thursday, California State University, East Bay played host to the Peers Envisioning and Engaging in Recovery Services (PEERS) Transition Age Youth Summit. The ballroom where opening sessions were held showcased a buzzing mix of 200 people: teenagers clutching coffees, college students greeting one another excitedly, and a huddle of child welfare professionals shaking hands and hanging name tags around their necks.

Proposed legislation, and the prospect of yet another class-action lawsuit against the state, may press lawmakers to resolve the issues preventing kids placed in out-of-county foster homes from getting needed mental health treatment.

In the New Industries Building on Alcatraz Island, window panes that have broken in the years since the prison closed have been left shattered. Walking through the exhibit The Sentence Unseen: Portraits of Resilience, which opened there on June 13, the crumbling space could be seen as a reminder of the devastation to families when a parent goes to prison.

Excited to be home from school, five-year-old Luna Garcia was playing with her little brothers in the front room of her apartment, her grandmother in another room, when she heard a hard knock on the door.

The Foster Youth Museum, eight years in the making, had a resoundingly successful gallery show at Warehouse 416 in Oakland last month. Over two thousand people visited the exhibit, “Lost Childhoods,” a curated collection of art and artifacts donated by former foster youth that, in the words of museum co-director Jamie Lee Evans, are “the stories no one else will tell.”

A 20-year-old’s saga of abuse, incarceration and heartache illuminates the shadowy intersection of child welfare and juvenile justice. “Like a picture in a magazine.” That’s how Angel’s mother Leah wanted their small townhouse in Pacifica, California, to look.

A few weeks ago, The Imprint began “Positive Youth Justice: Curbing Crime, Building Assets,” a series that imagines an entire continuum of juvenile justice services built on the positive youth development framework.

It is not ordinary to see people lined up around the block to hear a panel discussion on juvenile justice. But on the evening of Jan. 14 in downtown Oakland, California, nearly 200 people gathered for a conversation about, as moderator Lateefah Simon of the Rosenberg Foundation put it, “how we end the brutal systems we’ve created.”