When one young person first connected with LSJA, he was living out of state, working under the table, experiencing homelessness, no high school diploma or GED, with other barriers that made a stable future feel out of reach. After one intake call, he believed in the program so deeply that he moved to Dallas just days later. Today, he is steadily employed, on track to earn $90,000 this year, and is purchasing his first home with his partner. He was once denied a job pushing carts at a grocery store because no one believed in him — but LSJA did.
Your gift helps LSJA stand with young people like “Paul”. Give today and help a young Texan get a
real second chance/give a young Texan the tools to succeed.
The Problem
7 out of every 10 adults in state prison were first arrested before age nineteen (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/youth2025.html). LSJA pairs strategic litigation, policy advocacy, and community-based programs to transform the justice system for Texas youth and emerging adults and create opportunities for them to thrive.
LSJA Impact
The solution: kids rise when we invest in them.
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Lower rearrest |
Still employed at 180 days |
Of every $1 goes |
What we do — three ways
We help young people find jobs, training, and support. In 2025, LSJA served 1,609 people across the organization.
Our Transformative Justice participants earned an average of $18.36 an hour, and 68% were still working six months later.
We give free legal help to young people who can’t afford a lawyer. In 2025, we served 134 clients and gave $1.5 million worth of legal work — fighting harsh sentences and helping survivors come home.
We push for better, fairer laws — and it works across party lines. What started in Texas through Mercy for Survivors became national law in 2026.
To boldly address systemic failures in the justice system through advocacy and innovative evidence-based programs that improve life outcomes for youth and emerging adults.
Here’s exactly what your gift does:
Wrap a young person in support. Your gift helps connect a young person to intensive case management, a bus pass, counseling, food access, and job training — the everyday help that keeps a young person on track. About $10,000 carries one young person through program completion. That’s 1/28th the cost of a prison cell (Texas spends $281,243 a year to hold one youth in state secure confinement).
Give a kid a lawyer. Many of the young people we help are survivors of abuse or trafficking who got harsh sentences and can’t afford a lawyer. Your gift helps us stand up for them in court.
Bring survivors home. When our clients come home after years inside, they need a safe place to stay and support to get back on their feet. Your gift helps stand in the gap.
Build the movement. Your gift helps grow a strong, bipartisan coalition working to fix the system for good.
Justice is often defined by words like equality and fairness. But the way most people enter the criminal legal system and the treatment they receive is all but just. Systemic racism has tilted the scales of justice against communities of color. This imbalance demands acknowledgement and reckoning of a system that has advantaged some and disadvantaged others.
Since inception, the Lone Star Justice Alliance has challenged the inequities that disproportionately impact people of color in the legal system. Data shows that in the United States, Black and Latinx populations are overrepresented in the prison population. While all human lives should be valued, our country’s history and current policies produce outcomes that tell us they are not.
To effectively drive system change, racial equity is integrated into the fabric of our organization as well as our theory of change.
We are committed to challenging the policies and practices that produce disparate outcomes to establish a system where each person can receive equal justice under the law.
Organization name
Lone Star Justice Alliance
Tax id (EIN)
82-2345921
Causes
Justice-involved adults or youth
Operating Budget
$1,000,000 - $2,999,999
Counties Served
Collin, Dallas, Kaufman, Rockwall, Tarrant
BIPOC Serving
Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Other
Address
624 N. Good Latimer Expressway