The Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth (CAFETY), is a youth driven, grassroots organization dedicated to the protection of the human rights of youth placed in residential programs. Our aim is to create substantive cultural, policy and legislative change for the purpose of increasing youth protection, ensuring accountability and increasing transparency of residential programs.

We believe the state has an important role in ensuring that youth and those with disabilities receive non-coercive care and are protected from treatment that undermines their human dignity.

CAFETY's Care, NOT Coercion Campaign works to increase awareness of such problem programs and states that allow such practices as a result of inadequate regulatory policy or ineffective monitored. Some facilities escape regulation entirely and are often known as behavior modification programs, character building schools, wilderness programs, gay re-education camps, boot camps, or therapeutic boarding schools.

We do this by:

* outreaching to survivors,

*creating a support peer network to empower our youth survivors advocates,

*utilizing the power of personal narrative to
educate the public and stakeholders,

* organizing and mobilizing our base in support of legislation that affirms the human rights of youth, and

*building alliances with like-minded organizations.