The challenge

In California as elsewhere, girls and young women represent the fastest growing segment of the correctional population. Yet research, policies, and services still focus primarily on males. Girls and young women confined to juvenile detention centers, group homes, jails and adult prisons face special problems as they are removed from families or separated from their young children. They may face even greater challenges when the time comes for them to return to their communities. Most obviously, the growing number of girls and young women in the criminal justice system – mainly because of drugs or prostitution – reflects deeper social issues that demand caring, creative responses – ones often best developed by the young women themselves.

Seeds of commitment

Raised by a working class mother in San Francisco's economically depressed Western Addition, Lateefah Simon watched as friends and community members lost their homes to gentrification, and their children, their economic stability and their lives to drugs. Drawing strength and determination from these life experiences, Simon is weaving together her community by building an organization dedicated to providing realistic alternatives to crime and incarceration for young women. At the age of 17, Simon was working in her after-school job at Taco Bell when an outreach worker approached her from the Center for Young Women’s Development. Soon thereafter, Simon took an entry-level position with the Center. Her unflagging interest, enthusiasm and skills quickly won her promotions until, in 1997, at the age of 20, the Center's board of directors appointed her executive director.

Today, at 24, she is the oldest member of her staff. “I know the streets, I know the system, I know poverty, and I know how it feels to be 15 and not have a safe place to go,” she adds. “Working at this agency, I found my power, my voice. Many folks have asked me, ‘How do you do it and why have you sacrificed so much to do this work? The answer comes easy. I look at my daughter and find hope in that she is living in a world of struggle, of social and political movement. She and the other five-year-olds will grow up in a more just, more equitable world. She motivates me.”


Accomplishments

The Center for Young Women’s Development (C.Y.W.D.) is a grass roots nonprofit organization in San Francisco. Its mission is to promote economic self-sufficiency, community safety, and youth advocacy. Each year, the program trains 2,500 pre- and post-adjudicated young women to become leaders capable of shaping the laws and regulations that affect them. Participating young women have served on local commissions and policy boards, including the San Francisco Youth Commission, the Juvenile Justice Commission, the Young Women’s Health Advisory Committee to the San Francisco Health Commission, and the San Francisco District Attorney’s Prostitution Task Force. Approximately 110 young women have been employed as staff. Simon and her team have developed one of the nation's first peer-run education, employment and community reintegration programs for post adjudicated and currently incarcerated girls. The education program, which operates inside San Francisco's juvenile hall, is run entirely by formerly incarcerated young women.

Among the specific actions Simon and C.Y.W.D. have sponsored: • A demonstration against arbitrary police sweeps; the organizers were young Latina women (15 to 16 years old) who were labeled as gang members and were being harassed and picked up by the police daily. • Multicultural former young sex workers (15 to 17 years old), who were members of the C.Y.W.D. staff, became advocates and members of a 1996 mayor’s committee to research and make recommendations to the City Council on practical alternatives to incarceration for young women who were former prostitutes. • Previously jailed young women (16 to 19 years old) have developed “how to stay out of the system” training for incarcerated young women; they fought to be allowed in the San Francisco Juvenile Hall, where they now offer workshops to their peers – a precedent for the jail.


Her leadership style

This is an organization of committed, informed and hopeful young women. Simon says, “With what we've lived through, we could run cities and countries!" She and her staff have raised more than $1.5 million dollars to support the operations of the Center. She has delivered more than 30 keynote speeches at national conferences on youth issues and received multiple awards for her work, including two consecutive Local Hero awards from Health Initiatives for Youth. Though highly visible, she increasingly shares leadership with the young women who work with her. C.Y.W.D.’s goals are based, in part, on the organization’s opinion surveys of young women – those serving time or on the street. Simon admits that, were C.Y.W.D.’s goals entirely up to her, a few program priorities might different. But she eagerly responds to her constituency's stated needs.

“Lateefah is a very warm person,” says Marisah Wignarisia, a program officer with the Ms. Foundation, which helps fund C.Y.W.D. “When she enters new situations she has already done her research. She researches people, what they do and care about, and appeals to people based on what they care about most. She doesn't impose her agenda and can win over people who might otherwise be detractors. She has been able to leverage the power of young people to get things done even when money is not possible. She makes others aware of the immense power and abilities that young people have when they are committed to something. She has inspired me to do the work that I do. I work with young women all of the time. But there are some people that you meet along the way that make you proud of what you do.”


The future

The Center’s influence is spreading. At least two organizations, Young Women United for Oakland and Sister Outsider, in New York, view C.Y.W.D. as an organizational model. “Lateefah mentors these two organizations,” says Wignarisia. Simon is also expanding her constituency, knowledge and partnerships. C.Y.W.D. is currently developing an action campaign to protect the civil rights of lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth detainees. The organization is working closely with the San Francisco Juvenile Probation Department to develop ways for children to have more frequent access to their incarcerated teen parents. Simon is also working with the San Francisco mayor’s office to develop community alternatives to incarceration for young women. In addition to leadership development with girls inside the system, the Center is writing a "know-your-rights" guide in collaboration with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. The guide will be distributed to inmates system-wide.


More about Lateefah Simon

“Her strength is her passion …By the time the girls get in the system, they've usually had three times the number of problems the boys have had. They're so much more damaged than the boys, but there aren't the programs that there are for the boys. It's a huge problem, turning young women's lives around.”
– James Bell, a San Francisco attorney with the Youth Law Center

“Simon exudes confidence, idealism and a sense of civic responsibility. But those are not traits commonly associated with voters in her age group… Simon, whose energy matches her idealism, said that statistics aside, ‘I think it's a misconception that young people don't care. We know what's going to work. They (politicians) talk about guns in schools. Well, we know who's carrying guns. We need to be listened to. We need to be heard.’ Simon herself has had little difficulty being heard…. She has been active since high school, when she distributed condoms from her locker after watching family members and friends perish from AIDS.”
– The San Francisco Chronicle, November 29, 1999

"If you've survived four or five years on your own, you can do anything."
– Lateefah Simon, quoted in The San Francisco Examiner, April 24, 1998