The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's "Continuum of Care for Communities" describes a framework for youth justice services—and the dynamic and evolving nature of youth involvement in this continuum. This framework has been shown to improve youth outcomes and reduce reoffending, thereby advancing public safety. The goal is to prevent youth from entering or moving deeper into the juvenile justice system.
The graphic reflects the process for providing services to youth impacted at each stage. In an effective continuum of care, the majority of youth would be served through prevention and early/low intervention services. The number of youth served should decrease at each stage in the continuum.
JBS International (JBS), the University of Nebraska Omaha’s Juvenile Justice Institute (JJI), and Social Current (SC) have combined their knowledge and expertise to deliver comprehensive and multidimensional training and technical assistance (TTA) in support of the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and its continuum of care grantees across the country.
JBS, with 400+ experts and nearly 4 decades of TTA delivery experience, strives to create solutions that empower individuals and communities and improve lives, all while creating positive and sustainable systems changes. Through our in-house capabilities and field experts, especially with firsthand experience serving children and youth involved with juvenile justice, behavioral health, and child welfare systems, we provide big reach.
JBS’s extended collaboration with our network of academic experts and innovators enhances our ability to provide holistic TTA. Additionally, as part of our commitment to elevating the voices of the populations we serve, we convene and facilitate an Expert Advisory Panel comprising people with lived experience in juvenile justice and related systems. As a result, JBS brings a wealth of knowledge on the facilitators and barriers that affect youth outcomes, including:
- Protective factors
- Prevention and early intervention strategies
- Substance use disorder treatment services
- Cross-system collaboration
- Evidence-based practices (EBPs)
- Youth mental health
- Trauma and victimization
- Criminogenic factors
JJI was created to connect juvenile justice research to practice for local communities, state agencies, and policymakers. For 20+ years, it has supported statewide best practice initiatives through research, data analysis, comprehensive strategic planning, and TTA. In 2015, JJI created the Evidence-based Nebraska project, which supports over 250 community-based programs as part of youth continuums of care and opportunity. These represent 14 different program types, including, but not limited to, prevention, diversion, EBPs, and alternatives to detention. JJI brings expertise in guiding and supporting state and local communities in executing comprehensive community planning, developing collective impact strategies, understanding and visualizing data, logic modeling, and implementing program evaluation strategies.
SC is a national nonprofit whose mission is to advocate for and to implement equitable solutions to society’s toughest challenges, through collaboration, innovation, policy, and practice excellence. It focuses on six interwoven areas for impact and systemic change:
- Accreditation
- Child, family, and community well-being
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion
- Leadership and organizational excellence
- Brain science, trauma-informed approaches, and workforce resilience
- Policy and governmental affairs
SC established a Council on Accreditation Standards, representing a continuum of care for juvenile justice services (e.g., case management, day services, residential services), accrediting over 100 juvenile justice programs. Its subject matter experts have deep knowledge of juvenile services, including experience leading multiple systems of care grants on the continuum of care for youth and their families. SC's expertise includes juvenile justice, child welfare, and behavioral health services, as well as experience in restorative justice and trauma-informed TTA. Its TTA approach is a transformative model of racially just and trauma-informed practices.
With a mission to serve those who serve our communities, for more than 45 years the Institute for Intergovernmental Research (IIR) has equipped local, state, federal, Tribal, and regional jurisdictions with resources, tools, and innovations to help achieve their justice-related goals. Through its proven and trusted approach, IIR has earned a national reputation for excellence. This is exemplified in IIR's 28-year engagement with more than 140 Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) funded projects across the nation, focusing on formulating comprehensive approaches specifically aimed at supporting youth and families.
To support the OJJDP Continuum of Care framework for youth justice, safety, and accountability, IIR brings together technical and subject-matter expertise and lived experience to provide a comprehensive, service-based approach. The goal of IIR’s training and technical assistance (TTA) is to advance the capacities of state and local jurisdictions to plan and achieve expanded and coordinated service networks centered on community safety and effective early intervention programing that are responsive to the needs of youth and families.
IIR’s TTA team supporting this project includes a blend of backgrounds in juvenile justice, positive youth development, quantitative and qualitative analysis, strategic planning, youth and family engagement practices, implementation and sustainment science, nonprofit fund development, and change management. As part of the TTA team, IIR includes Fellows from its Leadership Center for Youth Justice Innovations to engage with field-based stakeholders. Together, the TTA team establishes collaborative relationships with program site representatives to ensure that support is specifically tailored to each site and that planning for youth success is fair, data-informed, cost-effective, and sustainable and, ultimately, reduces reliance on youth incarceration and detention.
The National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) works to reduce incarceration and violence, improve the outcomes of system-involved youth and adults, and increase the capacity and expertise of the organizations that serve these individuals. Catalyze Justice—part of the NICJR Building Local Continuums of Care (BLCC) training and technical assistance (TTA) team—brings expertise in working with stakeholders to replace the punitive youth prison model, rebalance the distribution of power and resources between systems and communities, and establish and strengthen community-led supports.
The NICJR TTA team will support states and local communities in building, strengthening, and sustaining cohesive, robust, community-based service networks for youth and their families, both to prevent violence involvement and to holistically meet youth intervention, diversion, and reentry needs. NICJR and Catalyze Justice will achieve this by providing tailored support to sites funded through BLCC. NICJR will also work with the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) and BLCC sites to disseminate lessons to the field, promote national models, and further momentum around decarceration and community-based continuums of care.
In all aspects of the work, NICJR will ensure that both site-level and national efforts address fairness, equity, and access to justice for all impacted youth and families, with a focus on addressing inequities of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity, ability, mental health status, immigration status, age, and religion. The NICJR team is also committed to ensuring that youth and families play a critical role in BLCC. To this end, NICJR will equip sites to work effectively with youth and families, meaningfully incorporate their input, and communicate back how their input was incorporated.