McCullum Youth Court - Youth in Leadership

McCullum Youth Court, in an effort to increase its ability to actively involve more at-risk youth in Alameda County, seeks to expand its existing Youth in Leadership program. The Youth in Leadership program is a year-long, unpaid commitment by Alameda County youth that have shown significant volunteer dedication and service to McCullum Youth Court. The program seeks to expand to not only provide a space for the youth to develop their independent planning and programming abilities within MYC, but also to professionally develop the youth and prepare them for higher education and the workplace. The YIL program consists of the following activities: Lead Meetings – Mondays, 5:00-7:00pm; Professional Development Workshops – Once a month; Team-Building Retreats – Once a month; Fundraising Events – Every 2 months; Law & Justice Summer Institute – 3-day summer retreat in July; MYC Youth Summit – Youth-coordinated conference in the beginning of Fall. The YIL program is a semi-autonomous leg of McCullum Youth Court; it is a completely youth-coordinated program that allows youth to take significant leadership roles within MYC with regards to being responsible for all the youth volunteers that participate in the organization. MYC is currently one of the oldest youth courts in the United States, recently celebrating its 15th-year anniversary in 2009. It allows first-time youth offenders to clear their record by going through a trial handled and coordinated entirely by youth volunteers. Offenders are assigned a college-age case manager, a youth prosecutor, and a youth attorney. These youths work with the offender to present his case and arrange the proper sentence proposals to be delivered during bi-monthly “Court Nights.” During Court Night, the offender is tried before a jury of his peers (volunteers and current offenders serving Jury Duty). The jury is ultimately responsible for reviewing the offender’s case and the sentence which the offender will receive and must complete in order to clear his record. Since its inception, MYC has more than doubled the cases it handles per month to 50, expanded its territorial reach to many more cities in Alameda County (including Richmond), doubled its youth volunteer base, and improved the organizational structure by becoming gender-specific in order to better serve the needs of and create a more beneficial space for female youth offenders who come through the program. In 2009, with funding aid from the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency, a study of the program found that it had a low recidivism rate of 17.8%, in comparison with the California juvenile justice system’s 65% recidivism rate. A following internal study found that 98% of program participants did not reoffend within a 5-month window.