June 16, 2026
The Honorable Members of the Council of the District of Columbia
John A. Wilson Building
1350 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20004
RE: Restoring Full Funding for the Credible Messenger Program
Dear Chairperson and Members of the Council:
The Youth Justice Project writes to urge the Council to close the remaining funding gap for the Credible Messenger Program and restore it to its current scope. The Council has already begun the work. Now it must finish it.
We are grateful for the leadership of Councilmember Parker and the Committee on Youth Affairs, whose early commitment of $500,000 began this restoration, and to the Committee of the Whole, which has now brought the total to $2 million above the Mayor’s proposed budget. That is roughly half of the $4.064 million the program needs to be fully restored. The progress is welcome. But the remaining gap of roughly $2 million still leaves the program far short of whole, and the young people who depend on it cannot absorb the difference.
The Youth Justice Project’s work centers on young people committed to the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. These are young people the District has already taken into its custody after adjudication. Some remain in secure detention or residential placement; many others live in the community under placement agreements they must follow. Credible Messengers reach youth in both settings, mentoring young people in secure facilities and staying with them when they return to the community. The District cannot impose these conditions, fail to fund the support that makes meeting them possible, and then call the resulting failure a young person’s fault.
For many committed youth, a Credible Messenger is the adult who makes community placement possible.
Credible Messengers are mentors and elder-peer navigators. Their credibility comes from having lived experience with circumstances these young people are navigating and having chosen a different path. A young person under DYRS supervision may be carrying court dates, curfew, school, therapy, programming, family pressure, and placement uncertainty all at once, often without one adult in their corner who has been there. A Credible Messenger has. They check in, talk things through, and keep a young person steady when the mounting pressures threaten to overwhelm them. The relationships credible messengers build with youth are impactful because they rest on shared experience and earned trust.
They also provide the most basic form of public-safety infrastructure: they show up.
Sometimes that means a ride. That may sound minor until a case turns on it. Many committed youth do not have a reliable way to get to needed services, school, court, counseling, or a job interview. When they cannot get there, the system records the absence as noncompliance. Noncompliance can become a technical violation of a young person’s community placement agreement. A violation can become a custody order (akin to a warrant), a hearing, detention, or a deeper placement. A Credible Messenger who picks up the phone, knocks on the door, and gets the young person where they need to be prevents that chain reaction before it begins.
Sometimes it means a warm handoff. When a young person needs a community-based service, Credible Messengers do not simply give them a phone number and hope. They bring the youth to the provider, make the introduction, help the youth understand what to expect, and stay close enough for the relationship to take hold. That is the difference between referral on paper and connection in real life.
And sometimes it means being the adult who sticks around.
Young people in DYRS custody often move through placements, programs, and schools. Relationships formed in one setting rupture at the next transition. The Credible Messenger can be the constant. When a young person is held in a secure facility, that constancy means keeping the relationship alive through the placement and meeting them on the other side at release, when a return to old conditions can undo months of progress. For that relationship to work, it must sit outside the ordinary chain of surveillance and sanctions. That is how a young person can be honest in it. Honesty is where accountability and change begins.
This is the hard work the District needs: reducing revocations, preventing detention, increasing connection to school and work, supporting families, and helping young people succeed in the least restrictive setting consistent with public safety.
It is also among the most cost-effective public-safety spending the District can make. DYRS’s own mission is to improve public safety while building on the strengths of youth and families in the least restrictive, most home-like environment consistent with public safety. The Credible Messenger Program is one of the clearest expressions of that mission. Cutting funding for this critical program pushes the District in the opposite direction: away from relationships, away from continuity, away from early intervention and prevention, and toward the much more expensive machinery of confinement and crisis response.
The Council is considering public-safety choices that will shape the District’s youth justice system for years. It should not spend more on detention and incarceration capacity while cutting the people whose daily work helps keep young people from returning to lockup in the first place. A bed in secure detention is the costliest response the District can buy. A Credible Messenger is the better investment because the intervention happens earlier, closer to home, and before a missed appointment, school problem, or family crisis becomes a legal event.
This year, the Council extended the youth curfew framework while emphasizing the need for structured, supervised, safe alternatives for young people. Credible Messengers are that kind of alternative. For youth already under DYRS supervision, they are often the only alternative within reach. It is hard to reconcile a vote to police young people’s time more tightly with a budget decision that defunds the trusted adults who help them use that time well.
The evidence for Credible Messenger mentoring is still developing, and the District should continue to evaluate and strengthen the program. But the case for restoration of funding does not depend on speculation. DYRS itself identifies Credible Messengers as full-time mentors for committed and post-committed youth. Their work is not peripheral to rehabilitation; it is part of the District’s own community-based continuum of care. And what they provide is exactly what research and practice tell us young people need to succeed to break the cycle of delinquency and incarceration: durable relationships, credible guidance, practical help, family and community connection, and support that arrives before noncompliance becomes a violation.
The Council should not treat this as an optional add-on. For committed youth living in the community, Credible Messengers are part of the infrastructure that makes community placement sustainable. Without them, “community placement” too often means supervision without support.
We ask the Council to finish what it has started and restore the Credible Messenger Program in full by closing the remaining gap of roughly $2 million. For the young people the District has committed to DYRS, this program comes down to specific daily acts: the mentor who answers the call, the ride that gets them to school, the introduction that connects them to help, the adult who can de-escalate a crisis, and the relationship that is still there after a placement changes or a case closes.
Those are not extras. They are the conditions of success. We urge the Council to keep them within reach.
Respectfully submitted,
The Youth Justice Project
(Open City Advocates)