JUST LOVE LAB
A launchpad for justice-involved youth to investigate, create, and lead.
ABOUT JUST LOVE LAB
Just Love Lab is a youth-powered platform for young people ages 16 to 24, grounded in trauma-informed practices. Our model combines investigative journalism, financial literacy, and community research to equip youth with the tools they need to navigate, challenge, and transform the systems shaping their lives.
Participants build skills in journalism, policy framing, data analysis, storytelling, and economic strategy. Guided by trusted coaches, they create original multimedia portfolios and financial blueprints, while contributing to a community data tool that reframes lived experience as credible evidence for educators, policymakers, and advocates.
This isn’t a program built for youth. It’s a launchpad built with them.
WHY NOW?
Mass incarceration is one of the nation’s most devastating public health and racial justice crises.
In the U.S., it produces trauma, chronic illness, and shortened life expectancy, especially in Black, Latino, and Native communities. It destabilizes families and entire communities across generations.
The pipeline is most brutal for youth. The U.S. locks up more young people than any other country. Black youth are more than five times as likely to be incarcerated as their white peers. And for the first time in two decades, youth incarceration is rising, even as research continues to show that early intervention, not punishment, leads to better outcomes.
Nearly 200,000 people in the U.S. are serving life sentences, including 70,000 convicted before the age of 25. This is a measure of how often systems fail during the years when the brain is still forming identity, judgment, and self-regulation.
Just Love Lab was not born of abstract ideas. Our founder has spent 15 years reporting from courtrooms, prisons, homes, and reentry programs across the country, witnessing patterns, listening to stories, and tracking the data behind them. Many of those stories came from people sentenced to life before age 25. One boy cycled through juvenile detention for truancy. Another was arrested in eighth grade for throwing a rock at a school security guard. One teen, so used to violence that fighting felt like instinct, punched first and asked questions later. Before they turned 21, they were serving life sentences, their futures shaped before they had fully formed.
Justice-involved youth carry insight, imagination, and power. When positioned as co-designers, they don’t just benefit from change—they help create it. Just Love Lab exists to help harness that potential before the system writes it in ink.
WHAT WE DO
Just Love Lab is built on three interlocking pillars, labs designed to support youth in owning narrative, building wealth, and shifting systems. Three labs—one pipeline from insight to impact.
INK (Identity. Narrative. Knowledge.)
The Story Lab
Youth investigate who they are, where they come from, and how incarceration has shaped their communities.
They develop trauma-informed skills in reporting, interviewing, data analysis, policy framing, and digital storytelling. Here, story becomes data with a pulse.
STACK (Strategy. Truth. Assets. Capital. Keystone.)
The Money Lab
Grounded in culturally rooted financial literacy, youth craft strategies for long-term security and reimagine their economic futures.
They learn to budget, build credit, save, invest, and explore entrepreneurship—creating blueprints for economic power.
key (kickoff. equity. youth.)
The Systems Lab
Youth learn to translate personal and community insights into usable data and evidence for systems change.
They contribute to the Health Index, our living data tool designed to reshape how institutions understand equity, well-being, and lived experience.
IMPACT
Each participant leaves with tangible outputs: original multimedia reporting, individualized financial plans, and contributions to a living Health Index that redefines what counts as evidence.
Just Love Lab is free and designed to provide youth with the tools, training, and mentorship needed to thrive.
At scale, it will become a national platform—licensable by schools, reentry programs, and youth justice organizations—so young people everywhere can access this work, no matter their background or location.
But the vision goes beyond growth. It’s about transformation: shifting who produces knowledge, what counts as data, and how success is defined in post-carceral America.
Youth leave not just with skills, but with power.
Founder Sylvia A. Harvey (SAH)
Award-winning journalist. Systems thinker. Builder of what should already exist.
Sylvia A. Harvey, known as SAH, is an award-winning journalist, speaker, and author whose work traces how race, class, public health, and policy shape the American experience. Her reporting has appeared in The Nation, Elle, Politico, Vox, The Marshall Project, The Root, and more. Her debut book, The Shadow System: Mass Incarceration and the American Family (Bold Type Books), was a finalist for the Media for a Just Society Award.
Over the past 15 years, SAH has reported from courtrooms, prisons, and living rooms across the country, investigating the human cost of mass incarceration. Her work has been supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, Type Media Center, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, and others, and cited by federal lawmakers calling for reform. A recipient of both the National Headliner Award and a Salute to Excellence award from the NABJ, she brings a rare mix of data, storytelling, and lived insight to her work.
With degrees in sociology and journalism from Columbia University, SAH combines rigorous research with a deep commitment to equity. Her earliest education, however, came not from classrooms, but from the visiting room—an experience that informs her belief in narrative as both strategy and survival.
Just Love Lab is the next chapter in her life’s work: a platform that equips justice-involved youth with the tools to investigate, imagine, and build new futures. Designed with—not for—young people, the Lab turns lived experience into public knowledge and economic power.