About Us
Art makes us think and it feeds our spirit. It is also a conduit towards a more just world. By responding to personal and social issues through the creative process, youth and mentor artists engaged in Creative Justice address systemic issues that contribute to our oppression, while building healing-centered spaces that strengthen the protective factors that help us all to thrive.
CREATIVE JUSTICE USES ART AS A VEHICLE TO:
Prepare young people to be leaders in community and the workplace.
Amplify youth voice as a source of community transformation.
Creative Justice provides a safe and healing-centered space for youth and young adults impacted by unjust systems. Guided by the collaborative efforts of mentor artists, participants explore the root causes of incarceration, weaving together art, creativity, and restorative justice to foster personal growth and societal change. With a commitment to amplifying marginalized voices, Creative Justice strives to create a world where we can all thrive.
Promote teamwork, collaboration, and community engagement.
Help lift up the power of young people of color, youth from low-income families, and LGBTQA youth.
Increase youth and community understanding of the histories and conditions that created racism, classism, ableism, sexism, heterosexism and other forms of oppression.
Enhance skills that help young people reflect on their social position, choices, and personal power so they have more tools to generate safety collectively with their peers, families and the greater community.
“In all communities something like Creative Justice is needed to thrive because it IS community, there is no separation.”
A Regional & Nation Wide Imperative
Decades of research show that juvenile incarceration fails—it does not increase public safety and it does not improve outcomes for youth. It creates crises in young people’s lives putting them at further risk of harm, dampening their future prospects and ability to thrive, and wastes tax dollars that could be used in much more productive ways. In response to community outcries for more restorative models, efforts locally and regionally have made remarkable strides decreasing reliance on youth incarceration and establishing infrastructure for community-based healing and accountability approaches.
However, not all young people have benefited equally: almost three quarters of juvenile detention (youth jail) admissions in King County are youth of color. Black, Brown and Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by this system. In 2015, local community organizers, led by Black and Brown youth, helped to pass a Seattle City Council resolution calling for “zero use of detention for youth” and employing more community-based restorative justice options instead.
With the support of 4Culture a cohort of community partners, systems actors, artists and No New Youth Jail organizers incubated the initial planning for Creative Justice as an innovative approach to this regional effort to develop in community restorative justice, healing and accountability programs.
Creative Justice has established a relationship with King County, including the King County juvenile criminal legal system, which allows us to offer arts-based healing engaged spaces for court and systems-impacted youth and young adults with an agreement that their time and creative work can be used in mitigating any active court cases or other systemic burdens they may be facing. In this way, Creative Justice asks our legal system, especially the criminal legal system, to behave differently: to view our youth through a wider lens, to trust the community to address its own needs, and to celebrate the strengths, brilliance and creativity of young people navigating a complex world.
“How could restorative justice work in practice? Seattle’s Creative Justice program provides an example.”
