Connie Rice Institute For Urban Peace

Capacity building: focuses on empowering community-based organizations (cbos) through infrastructure building, capacity development, and research-driven strategies. We create platforms for collaboration, ensure efficient systems for grant management, and advocate for policy changes that support community violence intervention (cvi) efforts. By fostering mutual accountability, we build strong partnerships to amplify local impact and drive meaningful change. Our goal is to strengthen both the community's capacity and the systems that support long-term, sustainable success.

Justice transformation (formerly smart justice): upi works to develop alternative solutions to mass incarceration and juvenile incarceration facilities by developing strategies to disrupt the prison pipeline and provide holistic alternatives to limit the number of bipoc youth that end up in the justice system. We do this through a three-pronged system: training, advocacy, and power-building. Upi trains prison-based violence interventionists, or credible messengers, to provide youth development services and restorative justice programs within juvenile facilities, we work with the la youth uprising coalition (layup) to lead advocacy campaigns to hold probation officers and the county accountable for their mistreatment of the youth in these, often, unsafe facilities while also advocating for funds (continued on schedule o)to be diverted from private prisons and be reallocated towards proven youth development services that focus on ensuring youth are not shepherded to the prison system as is often seen in the case of underserved black and brown individuals. Lastly, upi also empowers youth through youth leadership and liberation fellowships. Upi's advocacy has eliminated funding for harmful school-based probation services in los angeles county and has ensured the establishment of the new department of youth development, which launched in 2022.