Arts & Justice
The AJI
Story
Keshet’s Arts and Justice Initiatives focus on nurturing and advancing aligned partnerships and goals via multiple collaborative efforts for systemic change in local, state, and national juvenile (in)justice ecosystems.
The initiatives and partners/collaborators vary in scope, duration, nature of collaboration, and history of relationship. However, a constant through-line for Keshet is centering the arts in these initiatives, and centering system-impacted youth voices in the pursuit of a community-based, healing-based, and strengths-based approach to a re-imagined justice system.
Keshet’s work in this field began in 1997, and while originally focused specifically on dance education programming with incarcerated youth/young adults, Keshet’s work quickly evolved to use dance as a vehicle to propel juvenile justice legislative policy platforms and broader systems-change. Over the past 25 years of deep investment in this work, Keshet has built partnerships and collaborations with multiple community and government organizations, working towards meaningful and sustainable systems-change, including the closing of juvenile carceral settings in New Mexico, and increasing community-based and arts-based resources and resource-connectivity.
Currently, Keshet’s Arts and Justice Initiatives include:
- Daily programming within New Mexico’s juvenile prison system (since 1997), via Keshet’s M3 Program (Movement + Mentorship = Metamorphosis)
- Post-release programming, supporting previously incarcerated young artists/students throughout the parole and reintegration process.
- Curriculum codification, sharing, and teacher trainings – locally and nationally.
- Arts and Justice research initiatives, with a specific focus on research that supports progressive policy agenda platforms, in partnership with New Mexico Voices for Children www.nmvoices.org
- Community convenings with a focus on resource connectivity, activating opportunities for shared resources, moving youth out of carceral settings and into community.
- Participation as a founding member of the ABQ Justice for Youth Community Collaborative, in partnership with La Plazita Institute, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and 22 community organizations working on direct systems-change in juvenile justice.
- National peer learning programming in partnership with the Arts for Healing and Justice Network www.ahjnetwork.org, connecting field research and program learnings from organizations doing similar work at the intersection of arts and juvenile justice across the country.
- Local voting positions on Bernalillo County’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiatives Boards and Committees.
- Development and operation of Arts and Justice Youth Leader Internship Program which supports young adults transitioning out of incarceration in a 3-12 month, paid position of an arts-based community internship.
- Keshet’s Arts and Justice Youth Leadership Council, a youth driven council providing peer learning, policy/advocacy activism, and community support.
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Through Keshet’s Arts and Justice Initiatives, our work has included many other activities over the past 25 years, including (but certainly not limited to):
- Participation in the Create Justice national cohort for peer learning https://www.createjustice.org/ with subcommittee work specifically in arts and justice policy https://www.createjustice.org/policy-action-group
- Successful amendment to the NM Juvenile Parole Restrictions, amending the restriction for paroling youth to cut ties with mentors from “inside,” allowing for continued relationship support with the Keshet community on the “outside.”
- Recognition at the White House for Keshet’s M3 programming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN1WWoE-gg8&t=43s (at timestamp 2:05)
- Codification of Keshet’s M3 Curriculum, and national teacher trainings in five communities across the United States (Boulder, CO; Minneapolis, MN; Helena, MT; Monticello, NY; Washington, DC)
- Interdepartmental residency (Law School, Theater/Dance Department) at the University of Colorado Boulder.