@prisonculture   Mariame Kaba 

Mariame Kaba is a local Chicagoan activist. She is the founding director of Project NIA, which uses community-based models to advocate for both the end of the school-to-prison pipeline and of the criminalization of black youth, as well as end youth incarceration.¹⁴ She is also the co-founder of ChiFreeSchool, which arms youth with training and educational opportunities to become community leaders and activists through the study of historic social movements.¹⁴ In her recent work, Kaba published a juvenile justice research report that used neighborhood specific data from Chicago’s west side to shed light on the current issue surrounding the disproportionate incarceration of black youth.¹⁴

@Dreamdefenders The Dream Defenders 

The Dream Defenders is a Florida- and Alabama-based coalition of young black activists. The group was founded in 2012 in direct response to the Trayvon Martin killing. The organization took a stand in the wake of the killing and its surrounding injustice by leading a 31-day occupation of Florida govern Rick Scott’s office in an attempt to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline and respond to the racialized policing.¹⁷ The group, which consists of people who believe their dreams have been deferred by injustice, has continued to campaign on a plethora of issues.¹⁷ Namely, the Dream Defenders fight for the replacement of jails with schools and the disruption of the systems that criminalize black youth.¹⁷

@MalcolmLondon  Malcom London 

Malcolm London is a native Chicagoan and college student at the University of Illinois. He is a poet, performer and an activist for the equitable rights of black youth. He focuses on the criminalization of black youth, as well as their educational inadequacies. He is the winner of Louder than a Bomb youth poetry slam (for his poem ‘High School Training Grounds‘) in Chicago and thus, his mode of resistance is through art. In his activism against the school to prison pipeline, he can be quoted saying, “When you close a school and open a prison, a lot of people who don’t look like me make a lot of money.” ²⁰ He is also the co-chair of the Black Youth Project 100 Chicago Chapter, a national activist organization of black youth that organizes around  the educational, social and economic freedom of the black youth of Chicago.¹⁹

@DignityinSchools Dignity in Schools 

Dignity in Schools (DSC) was founded in 2006 as a local grassroots organization to “end school push out” and address the systematic inadequacies of the education system that harm minority youth. ²² Today is an organization that partners with grassroots organizations nationwide in an attempt to fight against zero-tolerance policies, the punishment of youth and the problem of school push out. DSC supports the state and local campaigns of its partnership organization and has led the development of school policies that serve to stop the school-to-prison pipeline.²¹

@C_Resistance  Critical Resistance 

Critical Resistance is a national activist movement seeking to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the normative belief that mass incarceration and punitive disciplinary policies keep us safe. Thus, the organization directly battles against zero-tolerance polices, which, although aimed to keep schools safe, are actually harmful to youth. The organization’s mission is the creation of safe communities that employ restorative justice, rather than rely on imprisonment and punishment.²⁴

@Youth_Justice Urban Youth Justice 

Urban Youth Justice is a grassroots organization that seeks to disrupt the many societal inequalities incurred by disadvantaged urban youth. The organization campaigns through advocacy, outreach and education within the community.²⁶ Currently, the organization is leading a focused educational initiative in the Pacific Northwest aimed at addressing educational inequalities and specifically, abolishing both the criminalization of colored youth and the zero tolerance discipline polices characteristic of the school-to-prison pipeline.²⁶

@Freedomside Freedomside

Freedomside is a new-age grassroots organization and activist collaborative compromised of young black organizers, students and volunteers from Ohio, Florida, Mississippi and Texas that collectively target unjust policies, in the hopes of generating change toward more equitable societal policies.²⁸ The organization is leading a massive civic engagement in the summer of 2015 to commemorate the Freedom Summer of 1964, in which African American’s first became registered voters. The organization will confront four specific missions in their attempt to elicit justice within society: participatory democracy, good jobs, quality education and decriminalization. Specifically, the organization dreams to transform the school-to-prison pipeline into a school-to-power pipeline.²⁸

@NYjusticeleague Justice League NYC

The Justice League NYC is a subset initiative of the nonviolent, social justice organization Gathering for Justice, which began in 2005 in response to the handcuffing and arrest of a 5 year-old ‘unruly’ black girl within her kindergarten class.³⁰ The Justice League NYC is composed of criminal justice activists and formerly incarcerated individuals who come from New York’s disadvantaged boroughs. The league is committed to addressing and educating the public on issues that relate to juvenile justice reform.³⁰ In September, the Justice League NYC held a 3-day conference entitled “Growing Up Locked Down,” which included a diverse program agenda including panels, workshops and seminars.³⁰