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 what we call Signal Literacy.
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.
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
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.
