Youth Justice
Young people who become involved in the justice system are deserving of support, rehabilitation, and safety. For too long, Maryland has focused on punitive punishment after the fact rather than services and support that prevent justice involvement for children. Black youth in particular are charged as adults in this state at alarming rates. And, relatedly, the public conversation around young people is dominated by fear, rather than data, research, or understanding of the root causes of crime.
Advance Maryland Education Fund serves as an anchor organization in the movement for youth justice in Maryland alongside dozens of partners from across the state. We strive to center youth, youth-led organizations, and youth-serving organizations, while working alongside policy experts and advocates. We provide the staffing, infrastructure, strategy, outreach, and communications support that allows the movement to grow.
The Maryland Youth Justice Coalition (MYJC) is a group of youth advocates, juvenile public defenders, national criminal justice reform organizations, social service providers, and more committed to transforming our youth justice system. We know that care, not cages, makes our communities safer and gives kids the support they need to not be defined by their worst moments. MYJC has been instrumental in the passage of landmark youth justice reform legislation like the Juvenile Restoration Act and the Child Interrogation Protection Act. Now, MYJC is committed to passing the Youth Equity and Safety Act, which would end the harmful practice of automatically charging children as adults.
Everyone deserves to feel safe in their community, especially our kids. Too often, conversations about safety place a disproportionate amount of responsibility on young people, often villainizing them and disregarding their rights, while overlooking their needs and right to safety. Community leaders and residents across our state are seeking information, data and resources to better understand how to respond to concerns and better support young people in Maryland. The Youth Rights & Safety Hub (YRSH) can help. YRSH partners with data specialists and communications experts to share the truth—not the hype—about what Maryland’s kids are experiencing and what they need to thrive.
In 2025, as part of YRSH, we launched We Are BMore — a campaign built to challenge the dominant narrative that reduces Baltimore’s young people to a single, harmful stereotype. The work began with what mattered most: listening.
Young people led every part of the project. Through multiple listening sessions, youth interviewed their peers to understand two things at once: how Baltimore’s young people feel about the public perceptions of them, and how they view themselves. From those conversations came the campaign’s messages written by youth, for youth, and for the broader public. The visual art and design were also youth-led.
We Are BMore is a reminder that Baltimore’s kids are artists and athletes, dancers and dreamers, musicians, inventors, problem-solvers, comedians, and far more than the headlines suggest.
This is movement work, and it requires sustained commitment. We will continue to serve as anchor, backbone infrastructure, and convenor in this movement alongside the partners and campaigns that are moving Maryland closer to a youth justice system rooted in care, dignity, and the voices of young people themselves.
