The All Youth Are Sacred (AYAS) Narrative Power Building Initiative was established by a core group of youth justice advocates within the California Alliance for Youth and Community Justice (CAYCJ) coalition. Our mission is to empower youth to tell their stories and tackle criminalizing narratives that fail to capture the decreasing numbers of youth arrest and incarceration.
AYAS seeks to build and nurture power at the local and state level through a shared framework that shifts the belief that young people should be punished when they make mistakes, and holds that healing and rehabilitation happens in the community, not through confinement and carceral systems.
Our initiative believes that if ALL youth are seen through the lens of sacredness and valued as such, then funding priorities will shift toward community-led solutions, policy priorities will shift and transform from punitive approaches, and we would build a “village” response to hold that young person.
Our approach to safety would transform to reflect that it is an entire community’s responsibility to provide young people, and by extension their families, with the basic needs to ensure they are set up for success rather than failure and incarceration.