Our Story

AVENUE JAM was conceived on November 11, 2025, during a late night in Brooklyn, New York, by Haïm Marrache, AVENUE JAM's current Executive Director.

The idea began with a simple observation: civic, legal, and humanitarian education is scarce in many secondary-school environments, and where it does exist, it can too often rely on textbooks, lectures, and one-directional instruction.

Haïm believed students needed something different — an environment built around discussion rather than lectures, questions rather than passive memorization, and healthy challenge rather than simply surrounding students with people who already think alike.

From that idea came AVENUE JAM: a youth-led organization built around a three-unit curriculum — civic education, human rights education, and legal rights literacy — with youth leadership woven through how every chapter runs.

From November 11, 2025 through February 20, 2026, Haïm began turning the concept into an organization.

During those months, he gathered an Executive Board, developed a preliminary organizational structure, built an initial website, and began establishing relationships and partnerships intended to support AVENUE JAM's mission.

During this period, AVENUE JAM established partnerships or organizational relationships with Amnesty International, the City of Miami, Gulliver Preparatory School, and Virtutem Populo, an organization founded by Haïm's political mentor, Maurits Acosta.

Haïm also began raising the funds necessary to formally establish AVENUE JAM as a corporation.

On February 20, 2026, with assistance from Maurits Acosta, AVENUE JAM was filed in the State of Delaware as an exempt, educational, and charitable entity.

Following incorporation, Haïm and the Executive Board began developing the organizational infrastructure that would eventually support AVENUE JAM's national chapter model.

The leadership team developed handbooks, organizational matrices, chapter structures, policies, and internal systems.

More than 100 pages of these materials were personally drafted by Haïm during an intensive late-night writing period as the organization worked to establish a coherent national structure.

The objective was not simply to create an organization, but to create a framework that could eventually be replicated by young people in communities beyond the organization's original home.

AVENUE JAM's relationship with Amnesty International also became an important part of its early development.

The organization attended Amnesty International's Annual General Meeting in Washington, D.C., as its only high-school corporate partner delegation.

The experience reinforced AVENUE JAM's belief that young people should not simply be spoken to about civic and human rights issues — they should be given opportunities to participate in the institutions, discussions, and communities surrounding those issues.

After establishing the corporation, AVENUE JAM's leadership internally raised the funds necessary to pursue federal tax-exempt recognition.

The organization's 501(c)(3) application was submitted on August 7, 2026.

This represented another step toward establishing AVENUE JAM as a nationally structured charitable educational organization.

On August 9, 2026, AVENUE JAM began developing its initial chapter structures across three states and eight major regions.

These structures marked the beginning of the organization's transition from a centralized founding organization into a national youth-led chapter network.

The chapter model allows AVENUE JAM to maintain a common national mission and educational framework while giving young people the ability to create discussions, invite speakers, organize educational events, and develop leadership within their own communities.