Celebrating 10 Years of the Youth Advocacy Project
In October 2025, we gathered to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Youth Advocacy Project (YAP) at Penn, and the room told the story. Filled with students, alumni, faculty, client-partners, and advocates, it was a powerful reminder that YSRP has never stood alone.
As YSRP Co-Founder Joanna Visser Adjoian reflected, “Lifelong friendships and bonds have been forged through this work, relationships that carry people forward long after a case ends.” Those relationships make it possible to imagine a different future for young people still facing adult incarceration today.
YSRP staff, YAP alumni and current students
From the beginning, this work has depended on community. Students willing to be scrappy and show up in jails and courtrooms. People inside who became our first teachers. Families and advocates who refused to give up. And partnerships like YAP at Penn that helped turn a bold idea into a lasting movement.
As our Executive Director Bianca van Heydoorn shared, this partnership isn’t just about changing outcomes for young people harmed by the adult criminal legal system. It’s about changing how we move: training future lawyers and social workers to grapple honestly with systems that cause harm and, in that grappling, choose humanity.
When we think about the future, we think about young people sitting in adult facilities today, and the community that makes it possible for them to be seen, defended, and supported. We think about a future designed by the people in rooms like the one that evening. People who understand the assignment: to listen, to be humble, and to center their work around client-partners and their families.
YAP Co-Founder Martha Hanna and YAP alum Sara Lynch.
About the Youth Advocacy Project
The Youth Advocacy Project (YAP) brings together Penn law and social work (SP2) students under the supervision of lawyers and social workers from the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project (YSRP) to support young people charged as adults in the Philadelphia area. Direct Service fellows work in small teams to write mitigation reports for a single client-partner per semester at decertification, sentencing, or reentry, and connect them with community resources. Know Your Rights fellows visit the youth block of Riverside Correctional Facility, equipping these young people with the necessary tools to navigate the criminal legal system by informing them of their rights, the judicial process, and resources.
