Program areas at NCYL
Compassionate Education Systems (CES Formerly known as FosterEd): This program of National Center for Youth Law ("NCYL") improves the social, emotional, relational, and educational outcomes for youth in foster care, the juvenile justice system, and youth experiencing homelessness. The CES team collaborates with state and local agencies through demonstration sites to ensure that the voices of young people are central to the decision-making process on issues that impact their lives, building healing-centered school and agency cultures, and ensuring effective coordination amongst schools, community and public agencies. This team currently operates as a statewide program in Arizona focused on foster youth and demonstration sites in four California counties. Sites in Los Angeles and Contra Costa counties focus on youth in foster care, Santa Clara county focuses on youth in the juvenile justice system, and in Monterey the focus is on youth who are experiencing homelessness.
Juvenile Justice: NCYL's juvenile justice campaigns are transforming California's youth justice system and ending the use of juvenile fines and fees in states across the country. The California Youth Justice Initiative is a statewide collective impact campaign that leverages coalition building, communication strategies, training and technical assistance, and the direct engagement of youth and families to create changes based in principles of healthy youth development to juvenile justice system policies and practices.
Health & Information: NCYL leads the Los Angeles Reproductive Health Equity Project for Foster Youth, a collective impact initiative that partners with youth with lived experiences in the foster care system and multiple public and private agencies to dismantle system-level barriers that impede youth in LA County foster care from accessing sexual and reproductive health care and education. Our Collaborative Responses to Commercial Sexual Exploitation Initiative brings together public agencies and community partners to change perceptions, build trust, develop and implement policy, and transform systems and community responses to commercial sexual exploitation to ensure survivors are supported to heal and thrive. Finally, our Adolescent Health team works to ensure that youth across the country can access confidential healthcare, including mental healthcare, and that healthcare providers understand the laws that impact their work with adolescents.
ECRA: The Education Civil Rights Alliance is a diverse and experienced group of organizers, educator organizations, community groups, professional associations, civil rights organizations, and government agencies that are committed to protecting the civil rights of marginalized students.
Immigration: NCYL represents the entire class of immigrant children in U.S. federal custody, including those separated from their families, in three class-action lawsuits: Flores v. Barr, Lucas R. v. Azar, and Duchitanga v. Lloyd. Our strategies to protect the rights of immigration children and ensure that they are reunited with their families as quickly as possible include: 1) Coalition building and network strengthening; 2) Advancing impact litigation to uphold the Flores Settlement Agreement; 3) Educating the media and policymakers; and 4) Developing and disseminating resources to ensure that public systems serving immigrant children and families understand their unique traumas and respond accordingly.
Legal Strategies: NCYL defends the rights of marginalized childrenacross the country through a diverse docket of impact litigation at theschool district, county, state, and federal levels. Our class-actionlawsuits focus on bringing about systemic change in each of our coreissue areas, which include: immigration, education, youth justice,child welfare, and health.
Child Welfare: NCYL's is leading a national initiative to protect the rights of children in foster care by ending the overuse of psychotropic medication and ensuring they are only prescribed psychotropic medications when in their best interest.
Other small programs unrelated to the significant programs currentlylisted.