Justice in Community

We fund place-based community organizations to effectively respond to known needs in response to local context: Communities know what they need and how best to deploy resources. Currently, our Justice Innovation and Collaboration Fund (Justice ICF) seeks to increase the ability of communities to reach system-impacted, system-involved, and/or system-vulnerable youth before socioeconomic factors lead them to actions that will involve them deeply in the criminal legal system. The Justice ICF provides 12-month awards to support the creation or scaling of place-based strategies determined by and for local communities. This work ultimately aims to document transferable and scalable solutions in reducing the number of youth and young adults involved in all aspects of the criminal legal system – carceral, probation, parole, and more – by empowering community youth and increasing community safety. In the future, we plan to expand beyond a youth focus to fund other community strategies.

We amplify narratives that center the voices of communities and individuals sharing nuanced stories about, and solutions for, how systemic issues impact them: Storytelling allows us to move away from the general and shed light on personal experiences of the criminal legal system and the people and communities impacted by it. In partnership with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth (CFSY) and Green Buzz Agency, the Aspen FCS Justice in Community Program created “Before They Could Dream,” a narrative podcast that explores youth incarceration through the stories of six people who were sentenced to long prison sentences, up to and including life without the possibility of parole, prior to their 18th birthdays. The podcast provides a place for learning, humanizing, reckoning, and memory, as well as a way to shed light on the individual impacts of our system. Moving forward, we aim to help tell broader community stories as well in order to ultimately lay the groundwork for narrative and systems change.

We provide expert guidance, technical assistance, and thought leadership to nonprofits engaged in work that seeks to remedy various injustices and connect them in order to learn from each other: While individual communities know how to solve their own challenges, sharing the burdens and the wins is critical for long-term success. Our Justice community of practice (COP) is a cohort of more than 20 local and national nonprofit organizations engaged in work with, and on behalf of, opportunity youth and vulnerable communities. The Justice COP engages in deep intra-community learning, cross-collaboration, and innovation through a robust learning agenda that includes monthly virtual meetings, biannual in-person meetings during the AFCS’ Opportunity Youth Forum (OYF) convenings, and regular participation in and support of member programming. Beyond the OYF, we plan to include organizations and work that take on even more expansive aspects of justice in their communities.