In 2025, Partners for Justice not only forged ahead, but deepened and expanded our impact. Our 2025 Annual Report catalogues our work to transform public defense across the country at a time when care for each other and our communities is essential.
Individual relationships were at the core of PFJ’s success in 2025. With 300 total Client Advocates trained and embedded in defender offices since we began in 2018, Advocates have collectively served more than 34,000 people over the last eight years—including more than 12,500 in 2025. To truly grasp the impact of this work, we spoke to a former client, Latoya, about how working with a Client Advocate empowered her to find stability.
“Working with Cierra was a matter of me succeeding or failing,” she said. Rather than behind bars, Latoya is now working as a case worker, helping individuals connect with community resources and other critical services.
Latoya’s story is one of several featured in the annual report that illustrate the power of client-led Collaborative Defense teams. While we know that Advocates are at the center of change, a 2025 outside evaluation led by Dr. Paul Heaton—researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Quattrone Center—validated their impact. His study found that Client Advocates in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, increased the number of cases resolved without conviction by nearly 50 percent.
Last year, PFJ’s impact measurement team worked with several defender partners to explore the impact their Client Advocate teams had on individual cases. The results were stunning: In 2024, the year the team examined, Advocates helped public defenders return nearly 4,000 years of freedom to clients.
Our Capacity Building team also stayed busy in 2025, launching the Collaborative Defense Toolkit. The toolkit is a resource bank to help public defenders incorporate Collaborative Defense into their office.
Justice is about more than what happens inside a courtroom. It's about addressing the systems governing those courtroom outcomes, creating human impact, and a fundamental truth: public safety comes when communities are able to thrive.
PFJ’s success in 2025 is thanks to a growing movement of people who believe in PFJ’s mission—to transform public defense across the United States—and are willing to build that vision alongside us. Without those people—our supporters, partners, and Advocates—we would not have had such an impactful 2025 and would not have started this year in similar fashion.
Thank you so much for your support.
