Lateefah Simon, Center for Young Women’s Development

"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."
- Lateefah Simon, Center for Young Women’s Development

Read transcript from July 25, 2003 Leadership Talks Archive

Join Leadership Talks on Friday, July 25, 2003 at 1 pm EST for a live, online interview with 2001 Leadership for a Changing World awardee Lateefah Simon, Executive Director of the Center for Young Women’s Development (C.Y.W.D), a grassroots organization that promotes economic self-sufficiency, community safety, and youth advocacy. Simon will discuss the challenges of providing realistic alternatives to crime and incarceration for young women who are or have been confined to juvenile detention centers, group homes, jails, and adult prisons.

Often facing special problems as they are removed from families or separated from their young children, young incarcerated women also encounter difficulties when returning to their communities. Simon believes the growing number of girls and young women in the criminal justice system – largely overlooked by research, policies, and services that focus primarily on males – reflects deeper social issues that demand caring, creative responses – responses often best developed by the young women themselves. 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. C.Y.W.D.’s education program operates inside San Francisco's juvenile hall and is run entirely by formerly incarcerated young women.

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. 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.

Among the specific actions Simon and C.Y.W.D. have sponsored:

• A demonstration against arbitrary police sweeps; the organizers were young Latina women who were labeled as gang members and were being harassed and picked up by the police daily.

• Multicultural former young sex workers, 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 are former prostitutes.

• Previously jailed young women 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.

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.

For more information

Leadership for a Changing World profile

Center for Young Women's Development