Strategic Partnerships
Building Strategic Partnerships through Unlikely Allies
JLUSA continues to cultivate powerful, cross-directional alliances that systematically center the expertise of directly impacted individuals across the country. Guided by our overarching Impact Strategy, we weave communities impacted by the criminal legal system into the very institutional fabrics responsible for systemic prevention, intervention, and policy design.
To operationalize this vision, our Strategic Partnerships department formally launched the Lived Experience Advisory Network (LEAN). Rather than relying on transactional, one-off focus groups, LEAN serves as our permanent, managed ecosystem of lived-experience experts. It is the formal bridge through which JLUSA securely co-designs, advises, and collaborates with our network of academic, clinical, correctional, and legal allies.
Through LEAN, we successfully integrate justice-impacted leadership into high-level decision-making spaces across five distinct partner sectors:
| PARTNER SECTOR | STRATEGIC ALLIES & INSTITUTIONAL COLLABORATORS | IMPACT & CO-DESIGN FUNCTION |
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Yale University, Columbia Justice Lab, Princeton University, George Mason University, Bard Prison Initiative | Partnering on community-based participatory research and rigorous academic studies. |
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National Institutes of Health JCOIN Project, American Heart Association, Health And ReEntry Project | Informing federal health initiatives, clinical research, and re-entry healthcare models. |
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One Voice United, American Correctional Association, Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, National Center for Victims of Crime, American Probation and Parole Association, National Association of Sheriffs | Transforming institutional cultures by introducing lived expertise into prosecutorial, correctional, and supervision practices. |
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Hip Hop Caucus, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Drug Policy Alliance, Marijuana Justice Coalition, Center for Justice Innovation, Corporation for Supportive Housing, Center for Employment Opportunities | Mobilizing large-scale narrative shifts, housing advocacy, and economic mobility initiatives. |
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Municipal Court Judges, National Association of County Officials, National League of Cities | Educating local and national government leaders on systemic levers for sustainable community investment. |
The Long-Term Objective: Through LEAN, JLUSA ensures that individuals with lived experience are embedded into every layer of institutional decision-making. By moving beyond temporary grant-funded opportunities into a permanent partnership infrastructure, we guarantee that systemic solutions are sustainably designed, realized, and implemented alongside our allies.
The Bard Micro-College for Just Community Leadership
JLUSA partners with the Bard Prison Initiative and College & Community Fellowship on a tuition-free microcollege housed in the Countee Cullen branch of the New York Public Library in Harlem, New York. It is the nation’s first tuition-free college dedicated to advocacy, arts, and sciences, and its first class of students entered in the fall of 2021.
Partnership with Yale University
Funded by the American Heart Association, InJUSTICE/JustRESEARCH investigates the role of mass incarceration as a structural determinant of cardiovascular disease, a question the field has largely avoided.
JLUSA co-designed the research strategy, centered the voices of incarcerated individuals and their families in study design, and is building the capacity of professionals with lived experience to participate in health equity research as contributors, not subjects.
ADVANCE (Advancing Preventive Healthcare Acceptance in Carceral Settings through Community Engagement) works to identify strategies that improve chronic disease management in correctional settings and address the systemic barriers that make carceral health care structurally inadequate. Community-engaged research is the method precisely because the people living inside those systems have knowledge that no external researcher can replicate.
Partnership with National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Funded by the National Institutes of Health under the Justice Community Overdose Innovation Network (JCOIN), the JustRESEARCH CERRC is building a new generation of researchers, people with histories of addiction and incarceration trained as research staff, principal investigators, and Community Advisory Board members. The objective is not just to include lived experience in existing research structures but to restructure those systems themselves, changing who gets to produce knowledge, not just who gets studied.
