CURYJ Is Helping Once Incarcerated Youth Find ‘Their Voice and Power’

By age 17, Xochtil Larios had experienced the foster care system, homelessness, and incarceration in juvenile hall for “like my fourth time.”

Upon her release, Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (CURYJ, pronounced “courage”) stepped in and changed her life. They helped her apply for housing for transitional-age foster youth, offered her a paid internship, and then hired her to teach critical life and leadership skills to currently incarcerated youth – tools that helped her beat the odds. Larios went on to become a Soros Open Society Justice Fellow, a recipient of the California Endowment Youth Awards, and a Laney College grad who aspires to lead CURYJ someday.

CURYJ “believed in me versus labeled me… so that I can be the leader that I never thought I would be,” says Larios, also a youth commissioner for Alameda County’s Juvenile Justice Commission.

The East Oakland-based nonprofit works with young people, mostly in Alameda County, who have been affected by the justice system. Their goal is to end youth incarceration in the state.

Since most incarcerated people have experienced trauma, part of CURYJ’s work is to help their clients move from their traumatized selves to their authentic selves so they can “find their voice and power and lean into their innate leadership,” says Executive Director George Galvis.

CURYJ was born in late 2010 when its co-founders set out to defeat local gang injunctions that typically criminalized Black and Brown people, Galvis says. They knew that defendants of these restraining orders would need support creating a new vision for their lives and communities.

Today, the nonprofit is creating its first “youth power zone” at BART’s Fruitvale Station, where Oscar Grant was infamously killed by a transit officer on New Year’s Day in 2009. This intentional community will offer their young people leadership and workforce development, life skills, and culturally-rooted healing.

“The safest communities don’t have the most police or the most prisons. They have the most resources – and we’re trying to provide resources to our community through this space,” Galvis says.

Designed to serve as a national model for what decarceration can look like, the Oscar Grant Youth Power Zone will include program space for youth leadership development, organizing, legal services, arts and cultural activism, as well as a digital media lab and a multi-purpose gathering and events space. An arts café will employ the young people they serve while helping to fund the nonprofit’s work.

The youth power zone will enable society to divest from systems that have caused harm and trauma to families and communities of color while replacing them with spaces and opportunities for these formerly incarcerated young people to “heal, grow, and thrive,” Galvis says.
“It’s an alternative to incarceration,” he said. “CURYJ unlocks the leadership of young people to dream beyond bars.”