The health of children and families with incarcerated loved ones in Louisville Metro is at the heart of our organization. We use a health equity framework to guide our analysis of the power systems that shape criminal justice in Louisville.
Louisville Family Justice Advocates grew out of weekly artmaking activities of The Special Project. In 2017 and 2018, the Special Project partnered with the Louisville Metro Department of Public Health & Wellbeing and Center for Health Equity to assess how an incarcerated parent affects the health of a child in Jefferson County. This Health Impact Assessment Report shows that parental incarceration harms children’s health and disproportionately affects black children in our community. You can read the highlights of this report here.
Working together, the Special Project Team, Louisville Metro, and the Center for Health Equity developed the image of tree as a metaphor to understand an equitable framework for health.
Leaves The leaves of the tree represent visible health outcomes for individuals, such as well being or illnesses.
Roots Beneath the tree, under the ground and often out of sight, are the root causes, such as income, employment and housing, that lead to individual health outcomes.
Soil The soil which feeds the roots, represents historical and current systems of power, like racism and sexism. This shapes how people experience the root causes and contributes to overall health.
This tree is LFJA’s framework for creating more equitable policy in our local criminal justice system.
In 2020, LFJA is focused on three criminal justice policies and practices:
1. Create art activities that decrease toxic stress and increase protective factors for children and families in the Visitors Lobby of the Louisville Metro Jail.
2. Improve visiting policies and practices in the Visitors Lobby.
3. Work with District Judges to create Family Responsibility Statements for consideration with defendants who are parents.
Using the health equity framework means LFJA must work on all three aspects: children’s individual health (leaves), root causes (roots) and systems of power (soil). Collecting and analyzing health outcomes and root cause data is essential, and understanding systems of power is equally important. Personal stories, past and present, are creative pathways to realizing how systems of power develop. Through stories, we see how individual choices are shaped by the soil and roots where they are planted.
Louisville Family Justice Advocates 
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