CALL US TeamChild staff are working remotely and can be reached by e-mail and phone.
Read our blog to follow along with TeamChild on a number of priorities this legislative session (2024) that will advance the well-being of youth impacted by the juvenile legal system and facing barriers to education, housing stability, employment, and services.
Our guiding principles for policy reform are:
- Decriminalization, decarceration, and abolition,
- Expanding and investing in community-led and community-based alternatives and resources,
- Increasing equitable access to education, healthcare and housing supports, and
- Shifting power and repairing harm in BIPOC communities.
From our beginnings, TeamChild has seen clearly that individual advocacy for each youth we work with will not, on its own, bring about all the changes our clients envision for a healthy and whole community. Those individual advocacy cases can create supportive and transformational outcomes for the individual client. However, our agency’s vision seeks support and transformation for all youth in Washington state, especially those impacted by the juvenile legal system, incarceration, and other oppressive systems. Policy advocacy is a critical component of achieving our agency mission and vision.
Our legal expertise and training give us a unique view of what contributes to system intervention resulting in poor outcomes, especially for youth who are marginalized by poverty, racism, and disability. Our vantage point shows how racism and inequity are woven into the structures of our public systems of care. The punitive strategies in school discipline and the juvenile legal system exacerbate these inequities because youth of color, youth with disabilities and poor youth bear a greater burden of their impact. Our clients, attorneys, and program staff inform our policy goals each year, grounded in the individual experiences of youth facing and overcoming barriers, and inspired by the hopes and expectations of the young people we serve.
From those deep roots, our policy team branches out to connect with a larger community of impacted youth and families, stakeholders, community members, allies in the advocacy work, partners at local and state levels, and the public at large. Our efforts center the voices of youth who have experienced the harms of systems, who also call out and demand more and better ways to be supported. We believe that our educational, healthcare, housing, child welfare, and juvenile legal systems are capable of transforming in ways that reject incarceration, exclusion, and punishment and prioritize inclusion, well-being, and equitable opportunities that keep youth on successful paths. Our measures of success include drastic reduction in youth incarceration and exclusionary discipline rates.
We use a variety of tactics to advance policy goals. We use data, research, and systems analysis to shine light where laws and practices allow for disparities and poor outcomes to persist. We take on the role of calling in key stakeholders and partners to recognize and dismantle systems that don’t work through legislative and rule change and engagement in state and local taskforces. We intervene in court cases that advance the law to protect the rights of youth. We collaborate with our Youth Advisory Board, as well as other youth, to identify priorities and strategies for real and lasting change. We leverage our access to policy makers, community leaders, and the courts so that impacted youth and community are developing and driving the solutions and strategies that replace outdated and ineffective approaches that dehumanize, isolate and damage youth.
