Devanshi Patel, Co-Founder & CEO

Devanshi Patel is a lawyer, educator, and architect of youth infrastructure whose work is redefining how communities prepare young people to lead, contribute, and shape the future. As co-founder and CEO of the Center for Youth and Family Advocacy (CYFA), she has built an organization centered on a fundamental belief: communities are strongest when young people are intentionally developed as leaders and engaged partners in civic life.

Through CYFA, Devanshi has created a comprehensive approach to youth development that integrates opportunity, growth, and contribution with leadership development, education, restorative practices, and civic engagement, designing the relationships, experiences, and systems that allow young people to build agency, resilience, belonging, and the capacity to create positive change.

She is the creator of The Restorative Ripple™, a framework demonstrating how youth voice and leadership can influence schools, organizations, justice systems, and communities, and she advances thought leadership through CYFA’s Building Youth Infrastructure publication.

As architect of CYFA’s youth development model, Devanshi has designed a continuum of leadership experiences spanning elementary school through adolescence and successful reintegration following incarceration, including The Zone, GPS2YES, The Next Chapter, the Youth Restorative Diversion Initiative, and the Youth Peer Court Ambassador Academy. She also established CYFA’s Youth Advisory Board, ensuring young people help shape the organization’s direction, strategy, and impact.

Her work brings together educators, legal professionals, researchers, nonprofit leaders, public agencies, families, and young people to improve outcomes for children and strengthen communities. Through CYFA, public scholarship, and national presentations, she challenges institutions to rethink how they invest in young people and to recognize youth as essential partners in building the future.

In addition to leading CYFA, Devanshi is an adjunct professor at Howard University School of Law, teaching juvenile justice and adoption law, and a substitute judge presiding over juvenile and domestic relations matters. Her scholarship examines the intersections of race, gender, youth development, and justice, with a focus on translating research into policies and practices that improve outcomes for children and families.

Devanshi’s leadership has been recognized with the Spirit of Leadership Award from the Arlington Community Foundation (2026), the Community Impact Award from the Arlington Civic Federation (2026), the Community Champion Award from Street Law (2026), recognition as a Community Policing Partner by the Arlington County Police Department (2026), the Woman of Vision Award from the Arlington Commission on the Status of Women (2024), the Willard W. “Woody” Brittain Community Appreciation Award from the Arlington Branch of the NAACP, Virginia Lawyers Weekly’s Influential Women of Law (2020), the Arlington County Bar Foundation Pro Bono Award (2017), and Leadership Arlington’s 40 Under 40 (2015).

Devanshi holds a Juris Doctor from Howard University School of Law, a Bachelor of Arts from George Mason University, an Equitable Community Change Certificate from Cornell University, and a Certificate in Nonprofit Management from Georgetown University.