JUST LOVE LAB

A justice-centered innovation lab where youth turn lived experience into measurable insight.

Where story becomes structure.
Where skill builds power.
Where truth becomes measurable.

THE VISION

Just Love Lab is a digital and learning lab for youth ages 16–24 who have met the justice system too early and are ready to investigate systems, build financial power, and turn lived experience into evidence for change.

Through a hands-on curriculum that combines investigative journalism and financial literacy, participants create original reporting and financial blueprints that transform insight into strategy.

Their work powers our flagship innovation—the Health Index—a youth-informed data platform enhanced by AI that translates stories and blueprints into measurable signals showing where equity thrives and where it breaks down. The Index maps inequities, forecasts system failures, and redefines what counts as evidence.

Built with and for youth, the Health Index helps schools, reentry programs, and policymakers see what young people have long understood: experience itself is evidence.

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THE METHOD

Story builds awareness.
Money builds stability.
Systems thinking builds evidence.

Together, these principles form three labs at Just Love Lab, a pipeline from insight to impact.

INK (Identity. Narrative. Knowledge.)

Youth learn journalism and storytelling as tools to investigate history, community, and power. They listen closely and record what others overlook.

The Story Lab

STACK (Strategy. Truth. Assets. Capital. Keystone.)

Participants build real-life financial literacy. They budget, build credit, save, invest, explore entrepreneurship, and create financial blueprints. 

The Money Lab

key (kickoff. equity. youth.)

Participants translate personal and community insight into usable data for the Health Index, turning lived experience into signals institutions can’t ignore.

The Systems Lab

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THE ORIGIN

Mass incarceration is not only a criminal justice issue. It is a public health crisis.
It fractures families, fuels chronic illness, and shortens lives—especially in Black, Latino, and Native communities.

Youth are the softest target. A suspension or shoplifting charge can become the first link in a long chain. The United States locks up more young people than any country in the world. Nearly 200,000 people are serving life sentences—more than 70,000 of them sentenced before age 25, before the brain has fully developed judgment, identity, or self-regulation.

Before training as a journalist, Just Love Lab founder Sylvia A. Harvey (SAH) was a mental stenographer of systems. Columbia taught her to frame evidence. Oakland taught her to see it.

That lens shaped her methodology: proximity, precision, and care.

For 15 years, her reporting has traced how race, class, and policy shape the criminal-legal system and the families it touches. Yet the stories of youth sentenced to life in prison remain the most haunting—and the most preventable.

She met them too late. They were all serving life before they turned 21.
These weren’t outliers. They were early warnings—signals the system failed to read.

Just Love Lab exists to change that, teaching young people to read, record, and rewrite those signals before the system writes them in ink.

The stories stayed with her—their weight, their silence, their predictability. Each one pointed to the same truth: the systems failing youth were visible long before a sentence was handed down.

What was missing wasn’t evidence. It was translation.

The Architect

Sylvia A. Harvey (SAH)
Award-winning journalist. Systems thinker. Architect of Just Love Lab.

SAH writes where policy meets people, tracing how the criminal-legal system, child welfare, and education policies deepen the collateral effects of mass incarceration. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Elle, Politico, Vox, The Marshall Project, The Root, VQR, and others.

At universities and conferences, she invites audiences to pause, reconsider, and see how systems quietly shape lives and communities. Her reporting follows the data to the doorstep, revealing how structures built to protect often reproduce harm. SAH’s work is cited by lawmakers and taught in classrooms nationwide.

She holds degrees in sociology and journalism from Columbia University. Her first education began in the prison visiting room.

Just Love Lab is the next chapter in her work: a structure where truth becomes public knowledge, and knowledge becomes strategy.

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