For young Philadelphians in residential care, speaking up can be an act of civic engagement, ombudsperson says

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When Philadelphia created an office to advocate for young people in residential facilities and field their complaints, it hired Tracie Johnson as the city’s first youth ombudsperson.

When she took up the post, she was alone.

Three years later, Johnson leads a four-person team responsible for more than 400 young people across more than 60 facilities in Philadelphia. The office grew out of investigations into abuse at residential facilities and became a permanent city agency after voters approved a ballot measure in May.

At the center of their work is a simple question: What happens when young people know their rights and speak up?

The Office of the Youth Ombudsperson is an independent city agency that advocates for young people in juvenile justice, child welfare and behavioral health residential facilities. When Johnson and her team visit facilities, they tour the premises, interview staff, review policies and provide residents with an extensive “know your rights” presentation. Though OYO does not conduct its own investigations, it works alongside the Department of Human Services when residents file complaints about their care.

OYO’s strongest enforcement tool is publicly reporting its findings, Johnson said. The office instead relies on its relationship with DHS, which contracts with residential providers and can require them to make changes.

“They have the authority to command compliance in a way that we can’t,” Johnson said.

Civic agency before the ballot

By working directly with young people in residential facilities, Johnson hopes to make “sure everyone has a voice.” For OYO, civic engagement begins before residents are old enough to vote: It means knowing their rights, speaking up and seeing that doing so can produce change.

“We’ve always been very intentional about [building a process for young people to share their voice],” Johnson said. “If young people are nonverbal, we’re doing a lot more prep around thumbs-up/thumbs-down, or pointing at a yes/no sheet, or pointing at pictures.”

A major aspect of Johnson’s mission is ensuring the young people in these facilities feel understood and heard. “Our young people are probably tired of being talked at about their problems and would love to be listened to about their problems, which is why we take the approach that we do,” she said.

Kelly Sagastume, who serves as the associate youth ombudsperson, told WHYY News that giving young people more agency while they are in residential facilities can encourage civic participation after they leave. “The likelihood of them coming home and then voting, getting a job, providing for their families … increases,” she said.

What the data shows

OYO also monitors whether young people in residential facilities have access to education. Residents attend school on the facility grounds, with a curriculum governed by the local school district. However, the 2025 OYO placement data shows that young people are increasingly being placed further away from Philadelphia.

The report shows that only 33% of youth are placed within Philadelphia or 10 miles of it, a considerable decrease from 52% two years earlier. Meanwhile, 57% were placed 50 miles or more from Philadelphia, up from 37% in 2023.

With the shift in location and school district, it can often take months for youth to be placed in a steady public school program. Johnson said the gap in education negatively affects a child’s development and confidence. Additionally, she notes that moving young people far from Philadelphia can also sever connections to their previous schools.

Data collection is a core part of the OYO’s work, and they publish their data and survey reports annually. During visits to facilities, Johnson and her team began collecting information not traditionally tracked. They asked young people about their religious background, sexual orientation and gender identity.

“A lot of people look at age, race, and gender, and that’s it. But in our first year, we started looking at religion, and we started noticing that the majority of the young people in the facilities that we were going to were Muslim,” she said.

It was through this process that the OYO found that some Muslim residents were not provided with the accommodations they needed to practice their faith, including access to prayer rugs, Qurans and kufis. In one facility, Johnson’s team worked with leadership and a community partner to provide those materials to young people in time for Ramadan.

For Johnson, the experience showed the value of asking questions that traditional data collection can miss. By learning more about how residents identify, OYO was able to pinpoint needs that otherwise might have gone unnoticed. “We had to learn that through the facilities, and then we began to act on it,” she said.

Speaking up to spark change

In her three years as youth ombudsperson, Johnson has found that young people in residential facilities sometimes believe speaking up won’t change anything.

That sense of powerlessness and lack of agency is not unique to young people in residential facilities. Nationally, half of Americans age 18-29 say that people like them have no say in what the government does.

But Johnson and her team try to counter that belief by showing residents that their complaints can lead to change. Sometimes, Johnson said, young people later recognize that speaking up helped improve conditions for their peers.

In instances where residents at Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Services Center have raised concerns about seclusion, where a child is locked in a room for an extended period, OYO worked with DHS on changes intended to reduce its use.

Johnson said young people who have since moved to other facilities have told OYO staff that they noticed a decline in the use of seclusion. Staff then tell them their complaints helped bring about that change.

“That was our advocacy,” she said.

OYO’s reach, however, is limited by its budget. Johnson leads a four-person team with a $500,000 annual budget and “that barely covers our salary,” she said. “There’s so much more that we could be doing if we had the right capital investment in our work.”

OYO also wants to consult former residents to advise the office on changes they wish to see in the system. Sagastume, however, notes the importance of being able to “pay them a livable wage,” which is not possible given OYO’s current budget.

“If we had a budget of 1 million, 1.5, 2 million, we [could] start to build out a process of having a Youth Action Board or a Youth Advisory Committee,” Johnson said.

Johnson said the stakes extend beyond conditions inside residential facilities. When young people repeatedly speak up and see nothing happen, she said, they can come to believe that participation itself is pointless, leading to a lack of civic engagement and voter apathy.

“Sometimes you hear young people [say], ‘What’s the point of saying anything? No one’s going to do anything about it,’” Johnson said. “And we get to be the people to prove that wrong.”

Editor’s Note: This story is part of a series on Youth Civic Engagement funded by the William Penn Foundation. WHYY News produces independent, fact-based news content for audiences in Greater Philadelphia, Delaware and South Jersey.