AFJ Partners with the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and the Center for Community Alternatives for a 3rd Year to Support NYC’s Returning Youth Citizens!

Avenues for Justice (AFJ) hosted a mixer yesterday at our Harlem community center for all service providers under the NextGen Network in partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ) and the Center for Community Alternatives (CCA). 

In 2021, AFJ received a first time grant from MOCJ and CCA to work with formerly incarcerated young people or those who are in the process of reentry into the community from a detention center. After two consecutive years of success within the reentry program, AFJ was informed by CCA in June that we were awarded a new 12-month contract to enroll 42 returning citizens from July 2023 through to June 2024, continuing our partnership with CCA. The new contract is off to a great start with AFJ enrolling 13 returning citizens who have spent time in a jail or prison and who are actively engaging in AFJ’s HIRE Up program. One of the new requirements of the new contract is that an AFJ staff member must visit one of three detention centers including Rikers Island, Crossroads Juvenile Facility, or Horizon Juvenile Facility once a month.  

According to the Sentencing Project, “in New York State, 89% of boys and 81% of girls released from state youth correctional facilities in the early 1990s were arrested as adults by age 28. Among the boys, 65% were convicted of felonies, and 71% were incarcerated as adults by age 28.” CCA’s priority, along with Next Gen partner organizations such as AFJ, is to provide as many services as possible to minimize the long-term impact of incarceration on this population’s future as they return to their communities.

Since working with CCA, AFJ has tapped into several job readiness related opportunities in their extensive network of wraparound services. The first connection that AFJ made was last summer during our Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) where AFJ’s music production interns took weekly field trips to Audio Pictures. A music studio run by Ryan Burvick, Audio Pictures focuses onbringing voices to the “unvoiced”. Ryan, having had experience teaching music classes to inmates at Rikers Island, was a wonderful fit for our program and was a mentor to our 2023 Second Chance Award Recipient, Thomas! 

In addition to working with Ryan at Audio Pictures, AFJ referred four of our reentry Participants to CCA’s Employment Connection Program (ECP). ECP helps young people, ages 18-24, compile important employment documents and provides screening interviews, work readiness workshops, as well as makes referrals to companies for young people who are job-ready. AFJ also offers our HIRE Up program to peer organizations in the NextGen Network enabling their young adults to join our hybrid workshops for expanded services for job readiness and certification, financial and digital literacy, educational assistance, teen empowerment and mental health care.

“I think it's important that we have partners like Avenues for Justice as part of our network who provide wraparound services and who have that specific attention to court advocacy. We need to have professionals who know how to navigate the system, and that's how we are able to lean on AFJ for the support in those spaces.” ~Nezry Bastien, CCA Director of Reentry Programs

Last night at Avenues for Justice’s Harlem Community Center, we hosted over 20 NextGen community leaders in a meet and greet to discuss benchmarks and goals for the new reentry cohort.T he groups represented were 67thPrecinct Clergy Council (Employment), Audio Pictures (Music), Emergent Works(Job Training), Giant Thinking (Physical Fitness), Petey Greene (Education),The Kite Zine (Job Training), Project Restore Bedstuy (Restorative Justice -Gun Violence), and Woosaa Wellness (Basketball & Yoga). We were thrilled to meet our partners at NextGen and look forward to utilizing this network with our reentry participants over the next 12 months.