Youth Justice and Power Union (YJPU) is a community grassroots organization that centers the voices of Black and Brown youth in Boston. Young people organize, basebuild, and lead campaigns, developing as leaders through organizing as well as through community building, mentorship, and political education.
Our mission is to build collective power in an effort to address systemic issues, at the root, happening in communities and confront them through organizing and direct action.
Youth leaders in YJPU do outreach to engage young people and adults in Boston, identify community needs and solutions, and organize so that the community can make its voice heard! This past year, we have held community workshops, town halls, and rallies, and worked with residents to testify at hearings and engage in the City’s new participatory budgeting process. We work as part of a larger movement where we have expanded youth jobs, including winning expansions of the program to include 14 year olds and 18-24 year olds and adding $15 million in funding from 2020-2024. We also worked with many groups to reinvest $19 million from the police budget in 2020-2023 into community priorities.
OUR BUDGET CAMPAIGN:
Ask yourself: Does Boston need to spend $474 million on police, or should some of that money be moved into community investments?
Last year, BPD’s budget went up by $69 million. What community needs do you see that you would have invested that money instead?
In many wealthier towns and suburbs, residents have excellent housing, schools, community programs, jobs, and health care. If we invested more in resources, could we keep communities safe with fewer police?
YJPU is fighting to move money from the police budget into communty investments. Black, Brown and working-class communities need investments in community resources and prevention — this prevents and transforms violence and harm. Police cause violence as part of a destructive system of mass incarceration; they are not a real solution, and with a massive $474 million budget they continue to take money from community investments. Just last year, their budget went up by $69 million.
Decrease the police budget. YJPU and groups around Boston pushed politicians to reduce the BPD budget by $19 million from 2020-2023, but since then it has gone back up to $474 million. We want to decrease the budget, including freezing police hiring and cutting and capping overtime.
Increase youth jobs funding for good-paying, truly year-round jobs. This includes making school-year jobs last from September-June and increasing pay rates for 14-24 year olds to $18-24/hr.
Increase funds for building truly affordable housing. The City gives less than $10 million of its own budget now for building new affordable housing, and most of it is still too expensive.
Fund $2.6 for community-led mental health crisis response. YJPU supports Boston People’s Response which is organizing to fund a community-led model to respond to mental health crises with trained community responders and not police.
Fund $40+ million for participatory budgeting. YJPU and DefundBosCops groups are part of the Better Budget Alliance, which is working to put 1% of the City budget into a fund that residents will vote on!
For two decades, youth organizers have fought to restore City funding for youth jobs after it was cut in the 9/11 recession. Youth Justice and Power Union (YJPU) took on this fight in 2011. As groups in Boston developed an analysis around the prison industrial complex and abolition, and as youth led Black Lives Matters protests joining millions in the U.S. and around the world, in 2015 YJPU began calling to defund the Boston police.
After the failure in 2020 of the City Council and Mayor to divest from the police and reinvest in Black and Brown communities, communities organized in 2021 to change the City “charter” (a version of a local constitution that sets the rules for how government and decisions work) to move budget powers from the Mayor and increase the power of City Councilors and the community. Youth and adult residents have used the pressure from 2020 and the new budget process to increase youth jobs funding from $6.5 million in 2020 to $21.4 million to 2024, as well as funding for priorities such as rental subisdies and violence prevention and community care after homicides. However, for many years successive Mayors have vetoed City Council budgets that include more investments and move more money from police to the community.
Youth Justice & Power Union (YJPU) is a youth led organization for and by people of color. YJPU was founded in 2011 in an effort to build up the leadership of people most impacted by systems of oppression to be the leaders we know, want, and need them to be if oppression is going to be fought and won.
The mission of the Youth Justice & Power Union is to build collective power in an effort to address systemic issues at the root happening in communities and confront them through organizing and direct action.
YJPU is partner in United Way of Massachusetts Bay’s New Way Forward initative:
