Sacramento, California
2024 RWJF Culture of Health Prize Winner
Diverse Sacramento Youth Organize to Build Power and Reimagine the Future
The voice of Sacramento’s youth is the voice of its future. Inspired by the belief that liberation takes every generation, residents of California’s capital city are proud to advance youth-centered and youth-led programs and policies.
Youth Forward, a local nonprofit coalition of 36 youth-serving organizations and thousands of individuals, is elevating the voices of young adults that represent every Sacramento community in the city. Together, they are addressing systemic issues such as poverty, public safety, and the criminal legal system. Legacies of colonialism, overcriminalization, carceral injustice, redlining, neighborhood disinvestment, and racial discrimination affect Sacramento’s substantial Native American, Asian refugee, diverse Latino immigrant, and Black communities. Youth leaders and the organizations that support them are building power through activism and organizing. To seed change locally and across the state, they recognize that those having experienced systems—such as the foster care or juvenile justice systems—know best how to improve them. The results are undeniable, with large investments from city leaders that prove that youth-led movements make communities stronger, safer, and help shape a better future for everyone. Key highlights of their work include:
- In 2022, a youth coalition and city leaders joined forces to win a ballot measure that established a Children’s Fund in the Sacramento City budget with 62% voter approval. Using local cannabis tax revenue, the fund supplements existing city investments in youth programming, such as youth mental health, substance use prevention, violence prevention, prevention of youth homelessness, and early childhood.
- Forty-nine percent of young adults who are homeless in Sacramento were previously in the foster care system. Youth-led groups are convening foster youth experts and county social workers to support a long-term, guaranteed, basic income program for aging-out foster youth.
- A new committee within a local youth coalition was established to reform Sacramento’s juvenile justice system. Collaborating with local organizations that serve youth in juvenile halls and are led by people with lived experience in the criminal legal system, Youth Forward and coalition leaders—including young adults who had been incarcerated as juveniles—successfully sued the county for violating California’s open meeting law, increasing transparency, oversight, and accountability.
- Youth organizations and the Sacramento Fire Department are currently launching a new job training program to prepare system-impacted young adults to become emergency medical technicians (EMTs) and to enter careers in health and public service. This new five-month program includes a monthly stipend and wraparound supports in addition to technical EMT training. Youth Forward approached the department with this idea out of concern for the few career opportunities available to young people leaving foster care and those impacted by the criminal justice system.
- Advocates led an effort to change how the City of Sacramento defines public safety. Historically, the City has understood public safety to refer primarily to the functions of the police and fire departments and to prioritize emergency response. During economic downturns, the city has consistently protected the police and fire budgets and cut youth programming. Following a series of listening sessions with young people to understand how they view being safe and where they feel safe, coalition members developed language to broaden the city’s public safety definition to include both the effects of structural racism and youth-focused prevention services delivered in partnership with community-based organizations. The City Council approved the resolution to redefine the city’s public safety definition.
Monica Ruelas Mares, Children’s Fund oversight commissioner and associate director of Funding the Next Generation, leads a few power-mapping activities at the intergenerational Sac Kids First Coalition meeting at Sol Collective, a community-based cultural hub that bridges social justice, youth empowerment, and community workshops in Sacramento, Calif.
The iconic Tower Bridge in downtown Sacramento leads to the Capitol Mall. Sacramento, the capital city of California, sits at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers.
Lozen Miranda-Brightman, an intern for Youth Forward's Tribal Youth Group attends a medicine bag workshop, which invites young girls to learn about mental health, self care, and traditional healing while crafting their own medicine bag filled with herbs like rosemary, sage, and/or sweetgrass. The workshop took place at the Washington Neighborhood Center in North Sacramento.
Community Organizers Jen Phanh (L) and Araiye (Ray) Thomas-Haysbert (R) talk outside their offices at Youth Forward in Sacramento, Calif. Youth Forward serves as the convening organization for the Sac Kids First Coalition.
Nia MooreWeathers (L), Youth Justice and Equity Policy Manager at Youth Forward; Ana Taukolo (C), Advocacy Coordinator at Empowering Pacific Islander Communities; and Monica Ruelas Mares (R), Associate Director of Funding the Next Generation and the Children’s Fund Oversight Commissioner, discuss the work of the Sac Kids First Coalition.
Derrell Roberts, CEO and Founder of Roberts Family Development Center (RFDC), speaks at a community event held at their offices in Sacramento. RFDC is a pillar in the historically underserved and disinvested North Sacramento Community. It serves youths of all backgrounds in the area and is a member of the Sac Kids First Coalition.
