Summer Learning Series
Since YSRP’s founding in 2014, our team and community have navigated a constantly shifting landscape in youth justice and legal reform. As the field continues to evolve, we believe this moment presents important opportunities to reflect, learn, and build toward what comes next.
This summer, YSRP is launching a new Virtual Summer Learning Series — conversations that invite supporters, advocates, practitioners, and community members into some of the strategic questions shaping our work and the broader movement.
On June 3rd, YSRP Associate Director of Reentry John Pace and Abolitionist Law Center Executive Director Saleem Holbrook joined YSRP Policy Director Margot Isman for a powerful conversation about the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's Lee decision and what it could mean for more than 1,100 people serving unconstitutional second-degree life without parole sentences.
Drawing on their lived experience and years of advocacy, John and Saleem reflected on the movement that helped bring many former Juvenile Lifers home and shared lessons that can help guide the work ahead. The discussion also explored the critical importance of parole and resentencing preparation, access to programming, and ensuring that directly impacted people help shape the path forward. View Recording
Freedom After Lee
June 17, 2026, 12-1pm
In this webinar, YSRP Director of Mitigation Annie Ruhnke and YSRP client-partners explored how mitigation uses narrative strategies to center potential and possibility, and why lessons learned alongside the Juvenile Lifer community should inform how we support young people facing adult prosecution who still have so much of their stories ahead of them. Watch the recording here. View Recording.
Lessons We Can’t Forget
July 15, 2026, 12-1pm
With a growing client-partner community and a resource-constrained environment, YSRP must rethink the reentry process. Instead of measuring success by measuring recidivism - a deficit-based metric - how do we assess when client-partners are thriving and how we might articulate a process of graduation from client-partner to community mentor or elder? Register here.