On March 12, the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco will host a MindSite News conversation with leaders of the Young Women’s Freedom Center, a Bay Area-rooted organization that has quietly become a force in reimagining justice and healing for young women and transgender and non-binary youth. 

The Women’s History Month event brings together Rep Lateefah Simon, who started at the Center as a teen and later served as its executive director, current executive director Julia Arroyo, and Emani Davis, the Center’s vice president of strategy and operations.

For more than three decades, the Young Women’s Freedom Center (YWFC) has worked with young people who have been pulled into the foster care and juvenile justice systems, or pushed into the underground street economy, often after surviving deep trauma. In that time, it has built a model that braids together healing, leadership development and organizing -– treating personal recovery and systemic change as inseparable.

The results are striking: Young people who complete YWFC programs are up to 85 percent less likely to be incarcerated again, and as many as 90 percent go on to maintain employment or meet their educational goals. As YWFC presses for an end to youth incarceration statewide, the Center has expanded into Los Angeles, Oakland, and Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties. MindSite News has followed this evolution closely, from a 2022 feature on the Center’s pioneering organizing model based on the premise that personal healing and political transformation go hand in hand, to a 2023 profile of Davis and her work to help activists confront burnout and trauma. Those stories chronicle not only the toll of incarceration and structural racism, but the ways that community-rooted mental health support can grow from people who have survived those systems and are determined to build something better.

Healing, like trauma, is stored in the body, but for Black and brown people, the world has taught us that our bodies are not safe – from forced labor, from forced imprisonment, from brutality and murder.”

—Emani Davis

“The work of the Young Women’s Freedom Center gets to the core of what MindSite News is about,” said founding editor Rob Waters. “At a time when our country is grappling with how to respond to trauma and rising levels of mental and emotional distress, their work shows that some of the most powerful mental health interventions are happening in community circles, in peer mentoring, and in movements to close youth prisons and create real alternatives.” 

“Lifting up these Bay Area stories helps illuminate what’s possible for justice reform and healing in communities across the country.”

The March 12 event will give Bay Area audiences a chance to hear directly from Simon, Arroyo and Davis about how they are carrying this work forward — and how they are tending to their own healing in the process. 

Tickets are available through the Commonwealth Club, with discounted admission for MindSite News readers using the code MINDSITE.