The creation of the Youth Experiential Learning Labs was the work of many, many individuals over the course of years. This included a core group of creative, brilliant youth and other staff who developed the structure and worked to include game design elements. There were also hundreds of participants who went through earlier versions of the Simulation and provided valuable feedback, tweaks, and fixes to help make it a better learning experience for everyone.
The core team who is currently running the simulation:
Angela Vigil is a Partner and Executive Director of the Pro Bono Practice at Baker McKenzie. She has directly represented system-involved children at the Children and Family Justice Center and as the Director of Children’s Law Pro Bono Projects at the Bluhm Legal Clinic of the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. She also worked as an attorney, director and clinical teacher at Northwestern Law School Legal Clinic where she founded and directed the children’s law pro bono practice in the clinic’s neighborhood branch office.
Cédric Foussard is an expert on justice for children, working at the international level. He is currently coordinator of Global Initiatives with Justice with Children and is the Advocacy and Global Learning Senior Advisor for Terre des hommes Foundation. For more than a decade he was Director of The International Juvenile Justice Observatory, an international not-for-profit organisation that promotes a global approach to child rights, especially for children in conflict with the law. You can follow him on Twitter here.
Brian Blalock is a senior staff attorney at the Youth Law Center, a civil rights firm working in collaboration and on behalf of youth. He has directed Research and Development (R+D) initiatives for the public sector, has run a child welfare, juvenile justice, and children’s behavioral healthcare system, and has been a public school teacher in the south Bronx. He has also directly represented children, youth, and families as a legal aid attorney in the Oakland/San Francisco area. He has graduate degrees from Harvard and Columbia Universities and a law degree from Stanford Law School. You can find him on Mastodon here.