About AHJN

The Arts for Healing and Justice Network (AHJN) is a formally structured collaboration, legally organized to support its member organizations. Serving as the coordinator for a grassroots variation on the collective impact model, we promote partnership among community-based arts organizations and between the Network and other public/private partners. AHJN has served as the coordinating and convening body for this work since 2012 and we are the only arts collaborative for youth experiencing incarceration in California.

By using a network structure, members maintain their current programs, identity, and culture through their own organizations, while also using AHJN as a comprehensive arts platform for serving youth in a more robust way. This collaborative approach ensures a continuum of interdisciplinary support and engagement for youth served, leading to rich programming, improved outcomes for youth, and more efficient re-directing of public dollars to community in a more equitable way. Because AHJN is comprised of a highly effective network of organizations with deep experience working with youth, and representing multiple arts forms, we are uniquely positioned to provide comprehensive arts programming with a richness and on a scale beyond any single organization or program.

We approach our work through three core activities:

• Backbone Support

• Movement Building

• Direct Youth Work

“

Art makes me feel...better than ever. I feel it coming just like the weather but on gloomy days my writing will not slip away.

Student / Arts for Healing and Justice Network

AHJN Overview

The Arts for Healing and Justice Network (formerly Arts for Incarcerated Youth Network) is an organization providing structure and coordination for the collaborative work of community-based arts education organizations serving system-impacted youth in Los Angeles County in order to provide alternatives to incarceration, build resiliency and wellness, increase community health, eliminate recidivism, and center arts as a change strategy for young people, communities, and systems.

In 2012, at the request of the founding members (InsideOut Writers, Street Poets Inc., The Unusual Suspects, Inc., Coalition for Engaged Education, New Earth, and Rhythm Arts Alliance), the Violence Prevention Coalition (VPC) began convening organizations providing arts-based programming to youth experiencing incarceration. 

In 2014, the group successfully provided hands-on, experiential training for Probation staff in an effort to shift Probation culture and encourage support and buy-in for arts as a critical partner in addressing youth trauma, providing healing, and transformation.

This led to deeper partnership, and in summer of 2015, AHJN completed a pilot project with LA County Probation through the then LA Arts Commission, and with the support of the Second District to provide arts programming in six detention camps as an innovative extension of the Children’s Defense Fund’s Freedom Schools program. Our findings showed adding arts increased the effectiveness of Freedom Schools through statistically significant increased participation and interest, increased confidence in reading aloud, and increased sense of hopefulness about student’s own future.

This success inspired the group to create a more formal structure and alliance, and with the support of the Nonprofit Sustainability Initiative, began a process to shape a collaborative umbrella structure. During this formative process, AHJN brought in the Armory Center for the Arts and Write Girl/Bold Ink Writers as members, and New Earth stepped out of the collaborative. Over the first year AHJN rapidly evolved from an exciting idea in early stages to an emerging force in the field, modeling partnership among community-based organizations, and between public and private partners. 

In January 2016, AHJN officially separated from the VPC and became its own entity under the fiscal sponsorship of Community Partners and in 2018 established itself as its own nonprofit receiving 501c3 status.

Current AHJN members are:

• Actors’ Gang

• Armory Center for the Arts 

• ArtworxLA

• Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles

• Give a Beat 

• Homeboy Art Academy

• InsideOut Writers

• Jail Guitar Doors 

• No Easy Props

• Rhythm Arts Alliance

• Street Poets, Inc.

• Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural 

• Unusual Suspects Theatre Company 

• Versa Style

• WriteGirl/ Bold Ink Writers

Areas of Focus