Ready to Rise: Transforming Youth Justice

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 In a quickly shifting policy landscape, Ready to Rise is shaping the future of youth justice in LA County. This panel highlights leaders and community-rooted organizations building systems to heal and provide opportunity for our young people. Join us in advancing a future grounded in care and liberation, not punishment. 

 Moderator: Diego Bravo. As the Program Director of Ready to Rise at the Liberty Hill Foundation, Diego works with government, foundation, and dedicated community-based organization partners to expand opportunities, resources, community-defined practices, and enrichment services for thousands of young people across LA County. The goal of Ready to Rise is to build a system that replaces the traditional and harmful structures of punishment and incarceration with emerging best practices centered in healing, learning, and opportunity. 

Mario Fedelin has spent his career empowering young people to lead change. After more than a decade in the national service movement with City Year, he founded Changeist—a program that brings diverse youth together for a year of civic action and leadership. A proud Obama Foundation Fellow and Senior Fellow at USC’s Brittingham Social Enterprise Lab, Mario also serves on several boards advancing community impact and social innovation. He lives in Signal Hill with his partner and daughter, where he continues organizing families around education and equity. 

Angela Johnson Peters has dedicated her professional and personal career to the support of community organizations, cultural institutions, artists, and activists. Angela is honored and privileged to have been working with the Social Justice Learning Institute (SJLI) for 13 years, first as a consultant working on community impact and engagement strategist and for the last eight years in a variety of role. She now serves as the National Director of Programs. For more than four decades, she has been an organizer, cultural worker, facilitator, trainer, producer, caterer, fundraiser, planner, and travel writer. She has worked with both Street Poets and YJC. Angela sees her working with communities and for social justice as a calling, and believes passionately in the importance of equity and providing access to resources to all. Angela was born and raised in Los Angeles, a product of LAUSD, and earned two bachelor’s degrees from UC Berkeley. 

Kruti Parekh is Youth Justice Coalition’s Director of Development & Training and a Coach for Healing & Justice for the youth justice movement.  She is committed to rerouting resources from harmful systems to ecosystems for youth development and wellness. Kruti supports the Youth MJustice Coalition and movement leaders, healers, and justice warriors to improve personal and community outcomes. She has been working synergistically with young people and families in the most marginalized communities in Los Angeles for the last 20 years and in New York prior to that. Her purpose is to raise consciousness & resistance against Stolen Land, Stolen Labor & Stolen Lives. Her goal is to help people bring voice to the things that get caught between their heart and their throat and to transform spaces of harm and violence into solace and serenity. She is a practitioner and educator of Transformative Justice. 

 Shanae Sharon is the Executive Director of Street Poets Inc., an organization whose mission is to harness the healing power of poetry and music to build community and inspire our next generation to write, rap and dream a new world into being for us all. She has worked in arts education for 20 years, and her transformative journey as a young artist not only guided her to this career but also keeps her deeply connected to the work. She has a MA of Educational Theater from NYU Steinhardt and a BA in Theater Arts and Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh.