Back to the Start Featured in Yale Justice Collaboratory National Annual Publication: Writing to Right the System

We are excited to announce we have been recognized in a publication produced by the Yale Justice Collaboratory, which highlights innovative approaches to justice grounded in connection, collaboration, and lived experience. The publication brings together work from across the country that demonstrates how shared stories and collective knowledge can shape more effective and humane systems. 

The Notebook is an annual volume that examines how unity can be built across differences and how it becomes a foundation for long-term change. Our article, Writing to Right the System, is included among those from a diverse group of scholars, artists, and advocates working at the intersection of story-telling, compassion, research, and policy. 

The feature focuses on our Multi-Sector Map, a policy framework designed to address the nature of systems that affect children and families. By linking areas such as education, housing, health, and child welfare, the map challenges the tendency to treat policy domains as separate. Instead, it emphasizes prevention oriented and cross-sector solutions.

The article highlights how this framework is set in motion through our incarcerated writers program. Inside San Quentin, program co-leads work together to identify legislative priorities across multiple policy areas each legislative cycle. These priorities are supported by our growing library of individual narratives, ensuring that policy advocacy is backed directly by lived experience.

These stories are shared with the public and decision making spaces through written and spoken narratives, as well as our film viewing events. In this way, we are able to connect personal experience to structural reform, showing how narrative can function not only as storytelling, but as a tool for policy change.

Being featured in this publication reflects recognition of the growth and leadership of our writers. We are honored to be included and remain committed to advancing policy solutions shaped by the voices of those most directly impacted.

Read the full article here: https://www.justicehappenshere.yale.edu/the-notebook2