NYEC, JUMP, and the National Basketball Social Justice Coalition Unite for Justice-Impacted Youth

At the National Youth Employment Coalition’s 2026 Annual Forum in Houston, a landmark panel brought together leaders from the Justice and Upward Mobility Project (JUMP) and the National Basketball Social Justice Coalition (NBSJC) to ask one of the field’s most urgent questions: how do we move beyond simply providing access to opportunity and begin building real, lasting career pathways for young people who have too often been counted out?

The answer, panelists made clear, starts with who is in the room — and who is leading the work.

A central theme of the panel was first-chance hiring — connecting young people with meaningful employment early to prevent deeper involvement in the justice system. Rather than waiting for justice involvement to occur and working to repair it after the fact, panelists made the case that investing in young people on the front end is both smarter policy and a stronger moral imperative.

With legal barriers often preventing justice-impacted youth from accessing livable-wage jobs, the stakes are high. These barriers fuel recidivism, contribute to labor shortages, and disproportionately fall on young people of color. NYEC has built a robust evidence base to address this challenge, including a 10-city community of practice and joint research on cross-system collaborative approaches to promote workforce development. Our Youth with Justice Involvement Toolkit offers practitioners and systems leaders concrete strategies for supporting young people navigating the intersection of the justice and workforce systems. This year’s forum featured innovative programs and partnerships solving for the barriers justice-impacted youth face — both in workshop sessions and on the main stage.