About the Project

We are an Omaha-based juvenile justice research and facilitation project that centers the experiences of system-impacted youth and their families. Our work acknowledges and seeks to reduce the harm and trauma that children, youth, and families experience within the juvenile justice system and at its edges. Our work can be divided into four distinct activities:

1. We interview system-impacted youth and adults, anonymize the interviews, and look for themes across these interviews.

2. We facilitate “Discovering Your Power” sessions with system-impacted youth and adults, where participants examine their experiences with things like support, relationships, fear, and guilt.

3. We facilitate sessions with system-employed people, which provide a unique opportunity to reflect, review, and reassess how we work with and support youth who are impacted by various systems, as well as how we support their families. Our facilitations are crafted utilizing actual data provided by system-impacted youth, adults who were system-impacted as youth, and their families.

4. We research the Douglas County juvenile justice system through acquisition and analysis of public documents and data, the construction of custom data sets and interfaces, and relationship building with individuals who are immersed in a particular system and can serve as partners in meaning-making.