Represent Justice

Represent Justice develops and implements film campaigns, and original content, authored and produced by system-impacted communities, to mobilize audiences to action.the organization carries out this work with a specific focus on driving outcomes that advance Justice for youth and women - two issue areas where our policy research and community consultation reveal significant narrative gaps and opportunities. To this end, in 2022 we led the campaigns for two feature films that address issues in the criminal Justice ecosystem - on these grounds, about the school-to-prison pipeline, and apart, about gender-responsive reentry programming. The two campaigns featured hundreds of community screening events with school districts, reentry offices, prisons and business leaders. Additionally, in fall 2022 we launched a new campaign for the hbo documentary film master of light, about healing through art and intergenerational cycles of trauma and incarceration, and we began campaign planning for the pbs documentary film sanson & me, about the Impact of incarceration on latinx and immigrant communities in the united states. Building on the success of the 2020-2021 ambassador program of 13 system-impacted individuals, Represent Justice selected a class of seven new ambassadors for the 2022 cohort, which included prominent nonprofit leaders, advocates, and artists, to build their narrative power as storytellers. Each ambassador came to the program with a desire to grow their personal storytelling skills while also wanting to leverage those skills to disrupt harmful narratives and to advocate for change in the Justice system. Ambassadors participated in comprehensive storytelling and film production trainings, and put their training into practice through experiential learning, self-advocacy and narrative powerbuilding. They each produced their own short film project to be used for advocacy efforts in their local communities. We also co-produced and message tested three additional short films with ambassadors to be used in local advocacy efforts. Additionally, Represent Justice completed the first phase of our storytelling and empathy study with stanford university; launched a public awareness campaign to free lakeith smith; distributed a comprehensive case study for Justice for julius, a national campaign powered by Represent Justice to save the life of julius jones in Oklahoma, which resulted in his 11th hour death row commutation; and grew our play for Justice event initiative with the nba.