Forging pathways for young people out of the justice system and into success

According to the Citizens' Commission for Children of New York, youth arrest rates in New York state have dropped steadily from 2012 to 2022, with some of that drop due to the Raise The Age law passed in 2017 that lifted the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18. Despite that, every year countless individuals under age 18 in the city and state interacted in some way with the justice system in 2024, whether that was being arrested, charged with or found guilty of some level of crime. And those interactions often pull young people off an education track for good, which in turn pulls them off the track to getting a decent job and having a sense of purpose.

That's where Exalt Youth comes in. Founded in 2006, the nonprofit has a Financial District headquarters, a staff of 47 and an operating budget of $12 million from private donors including the Gates and Robin Hood foundations. It says that it worked with 1,000 young people this year alone, not only intervening on their behalf before judges and their school teachers and administrators but putting them in an intensive after-school goal- and skills-building program and then placing them in internships related to their goals, paying them $18-an-hour. Even after young people complete the initial 5-month program, they can stay in the program another two years as it helps shepherd them into further internships and/or college or post-high school training and certification in different fields. The program even takes its young charges on college tours.

Recently, Exalt announced that it would expand its services to the Syracuse area, and that it would like to start a national training center for its model to be replicated in locales nationwide. City & State spoke with Gisele Castro, one of Exalt's cofounders and its CEO since 2016, about what it's like running the ambitious program, the personal story that set her on her career path and what she hopes to achieve with Exalt in the years ahead.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Thank you for talking today. If we met at a party or conference and you told me you were the CEO of Exalt Youth and I asked what that was and what you did, how would you reply?

I'd say that I'm the CEO for a growing New York City organization that is scaling to Syracuse because there's a need to work with young people who've been arrested. And we have a good model which can support them in school, with work and with having judges come to a favorable court resolution for them.

That's a bit abstract. Can you walk me through a kind of composite case to bring what Exalt does to life?

We work in New York City with young people who are impacted by the juvenile justice system. In New York City, we have a lot of families that live in economically disadvantaged conditions. They're either unemployed or underemployed or going to underresourced schools. And historically many of the young people from these families have chronic truancy – and when a young person is not in school, at a certain point they get in trouble, and that can lead to arrest ranging from a misdemeanor for something like graffiti to something serious like attempted murder.

So we created a structure to support these young people academically. With young people coming from a community lacking resources, we'll first spark their love of learning with our five-week after-school program. Secondly, we ensure that they gain an internship with an employer that could be a law firm, an architecture firm or a restaurant. We're aiming to help them develop a worker's identity. Teenagers need to learn that working is what yields money.

Within the court system, a young person could enter through family court, youth court or the state Supreme Court. We provide the judge with a narrative on the young person's progress, so the judge then has a good sense of the young person as he or she is determining their legal outcomes. That could mean reducing a serious felony to a misdemeanor or even dropping the case.

I'll give you one of our many success stories: We had a young person who'd been suspended from school but who was actually interested in going to law school at some point. So we helped place them in an internship at the U.N., then another at a law firm. Then, using our scholarship endowment, we helped them go to St. John's University, then to law school. And this person is now a lawyer.

We have many stories like this. We're able to give young people the best learning opportunities with a paid internship. We help them move out of chronic despair. Because once a person is stuck in the justice system, it's very hard to get out.

So often you are helping young people in the interval between when they are arrested and when they go before a judge – so you can say to the judge, "Look what he or she has been doing since the arrest to better their lives." Correct?

Most of them are coming to us at that point, but it could also be a young person who's been arrested but with no charges pressed, or they've been arrested and charged and we connect at the arraignment, or when the judge is about to sentence them. Or when a young person comes out of family court and is detained. Or when they're released from Rikers. Or when they've been out of the justice system for a year.

How do you find the young people you work with?

They're referred to us by a teacher, a principal, a social worker, someone in the nonprofit sector, someone in the D.A.'s office, the judges, their attorneys. But we have a fundamentally different lens than the justice system. Because typically a school suspension is only talked about as creating high-risk for crime. But typically the school doesn't have a strong plan to get the young person back to school, so we work with teachers to get the young person's transcript. We have after-school tutors. We also support them with an individual education plan with a yearly evaluation. They also tell us that the five-week curriculum we give them from 4-7 p.m., five nights a week, is the best learning they've ever had.

What is it?

The first week they learn that they can either be fearful of their future or have a clear vision of it. We're introducing four core skills: critical thinking, effective communications, resource management and creative problem-solving. We teach them about the school-to-prison pipeline. We make sure they quickly understand the magnitude of not being in school and entry into prison. Then we teach them about mass incarceration.

It sounds like you're showing them that what they're facing is not specific to them but is part of a systemic societal problem.

Yes. We're showing them data, policy. Then down the line, they role-play as members of a workplace. They have to do things like lay people off. They get to see the complexities of a system, learning via the Socratic method.

Can you tell me some more individual stories that bring the program further to life?

Yes, Cally. She's in this video on our website, the one at the end who says, "I didn't think I had a place in society, and now I do – I'm paving my own path." So she was 17 when she came to Exalt after being expelled from her high school in the Bronx for getting into a fight. She'd also watched one of her friends get killed right in front of her. So we helped her return to school and placed her first in an internship at a law firm and then at another with the Andrus Family Fund. She was always so interested in what meetings I was taking, and when she learned about foundations, she wanted to learn more about them. And now she's living with a husband and children in Atlanta and has her own nonprofit that supports first-time military moms, because her husband is in the military. But it was through Exalt that she realized she was actually a brilliant young person with her own goals and aspirations.

Please tell another story.

Yes, if you watch the video on this link under "Learn about Exalt's workforce approach...", you'll learn about Denajah, a young woman who was referred to us by the New York City Department of Probation. She wasn't going to school. She was disconnected. So through us, she did two internships and then became interested in lobbying with the Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus within the Legislature in Albany. And now she has her scholarship to go to college and wants to become a forensic psychologist.

So, you see, we want young people to understand that court involvement is an experience they might have but it's not their identity or their life.

You receive a lot of support from private foundations like Gates and Robin Hood. How do you go about that?

I actually enjoy fundraising, which I think is rare for many nonprofit leaders. It's all about having a strong proposal supported by data and outcomes. 

What else makes a strong fundraiser?

It's that you're not just passionate about the work, but that you can describe where it's headed. Funders want to fund a concrete plan. I really enjoy entering a dialogue. Whether folks end up funding Exalt or not, they can see that they can play a true role. I love dreaming about the future, and typically funders do, too.

What's your elevator pitch to potential funders?

That's not how it works! You don't get them to write you a check by boiling something down for them. You have to build relationships. I'll give you an example. One donor of ours, I met them at a yoga class in Westchester where I live. This person works on Wall St. I was trying to identify where Exalt could relocate to. And this person said, What about FiDi?” And when I finally signed the lease, this person and their spouse took me to dinner to celebrate – and they handed me a check for $52,000.

So in other words, you engaged them in a relationship over time.

Correct. Another donor who was supporting us at about $100,000, well, they're now a funder of a 4-year, $2.5 million grant.

How did you do that?

It was methodically having multiple meetings with their trustees, having them come in and meet with me and my team and sit in a class.

So it's really about engaging over the long term.

None of this is an overnight thing. It's a lot of work. So as a CEO, you really must love it. If you don't like being with people, analyzing and strategizing, you can't create a sustainable organization with strong outcomes. You need a massive network.

Can you give me a brief bio of how you got where you are?

I grew up in the Bronx watching "Eyewitness News" all the time with my dad. I thought I'd be a journalist. I interned on "The Rolanda Watts Show." Then in the nineties, my brother was arrested when he was 17 and I was about 12. I can't recall what he was arrested for. But because I was close to the situation, I began to understand how deep and unfair the system was. This was during the Rockefeller laws [which in New York state imposed harsh penalties for possessing or selling even small amounts of drugs, including marijuana. Begun in 1973, they were essentially dropped in 2009.] I asked myself, "How do we fix this?" Then, while at John Jay College, I started to create Exalt on paper, knowing that it would take education, internships and some kind of court advocacy model before a judge.

So then I got a job at CASES  – the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services – as one of the court staff to speak to judges. In less than five months, I was promoted to be the director of the Family Court Unit, where I changed the entire model, bringing in social workers. And then I went for my MPA at Pace, which included studying at Oxford University in the U.K., where I did my thesis on comparing the U.S. and U.K. justice systems.

So then I came back to New York, and, with some colleagues from CASES, formed Exalt in 2006. A decade later, 2016, I was on the board but stepped in to be the interim CEO, and then the board asked me if I would stay.

Where do you think you excel skill-wise?

Developing, implementing and organizing strategies. It starts off for me with a 3-year strategic plan. We have a Role Responsibility template. So everyone has specific goals to meet the strategic plan. I have a dashboard where I can track progress, which helps mitigate risk and make changes and adaptations. It's very goal-oriented.

What personal skills are you still working on?

Making sure I'm not in the day-to-day. You need a strong executive team, which I have. The other thing is learning more about AI.

Are you saying you need to work on delegating more?

And releasing more. Yes.

What are your goals for Exalt in the next three years?

To increase the number of young people that we serve.

To what? 2,000 a year?

No, up to 1,500. Including 200 young people in Syracuse.

And what do you need to do that?

More funding.

Final question: Why do you do the work that you do?

I believe in justice, in opportunity, in humanity. It sounds pretty clichéd, but it's at the core of why I do what I do. Our young people have so much talent. We have a lot of young staff fresh out of college and I've seen that they love working with purpose. Creating a space that challenges them is something that I love to do. They understand the complexities of the problem without being overwhelmed.

Is there a way in for Exalt for those who want to get involved by perhaps offering a young person an internship that Exalt will pay for?

Yes, go to our website and reach out and ask for our chief program officer, Jason Alleyne.

Finally, as a nonprofit, have you experienced any cuts in federal funding under the Trump 2.0 administration, as so many nonprofits have?

We don't receive federal funding, but we're feeling the collateral damage to those cuts, unfortunately. Funders that would've typically funded us are doubling down on their current grantees that have lost federal funding.