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. With this new power, the City Council voted in 2022 to boost youth jobs funding to $16 million and increase funding for rental subsidies fro affordable housing to $9.8 million. It pressured Mayor Wu to cut the police budget to $395 million, although an 8-5 vote fell 1 vote short of a required 9 votes to move another $2 million from the police department to youth jobs.
In 2023, YJPU is continuing to push for moving police funding into community-led mental health crisis response, youth jobs, and affordable housing!
In The News: Youth Justice and Power Union and DefundBosCops attended the Mayor’s coffee hour on June 13 to push her to accept the City Council’s budget, but she refused. Read the article here.
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.
