My Nonprofit Reviews

Working with the Ella Baker Center changed my life. As a freshman in college, I knew that I was interested in policies about youth incarceration and the juvenile justice system, but I didn't know what to do with that interest. I started volunteering with the Ella Baker Center and met three incredible women doing extremely important work. Each of them worked or volunteered with the Ella Baker Center, and each of them were mothers of young men who had been incarcerated in the California Youth Authority. They found the strength to turn the tragedy of their sons' incarceration into a passion for change. They are only three out of many talented people who work with the EBC, but their passion and life experiences really pushed me to start trying to make a real difference in the issues I cared about. I haven't had as much time as I would like to volunteer with the Center in the last year, but because of these three women, I secured a grant to study innovative juvenile justice policies abroad, and then brought that knowledge back to my community to work with the Alameda County Juvenile Hall to start implementing changes. The point of this story is that the Ella Baker Center not only does powerful and important work in its own right, it also inspires and enables volunteers like me to take the responsibility of making change into our own hands.

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