Building Local Continuums of Care to Support Youth Success - Training and Technical Assistance

The National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) 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.

Specifically, the NICJR team will: 1) Provide tailored support to sites funded under categories 1 and 2 and 2) work with the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) and the sites to disseminate lessons to the field, promote national models, and further momentum around decarceration and community-based continuums of care. Tailored site support will include developing site-specific TTA plans, providing monthly virtual support to each site's planning council and continuum coordinator, conducting in-person site visits for targeted assistance, facilitating quarterly webinars with national experts on key topics, supporting sites; follow-up engagement with relevant experts, holding one in-person convening for all site representatives to learn from each other and/or engage with national experts, organizing regional in-person gatherings for site representatives to visit a model program in their geographic area, and providing ongoing virtual TTA (including sustainability planning support). Dissemination will likely include but not be limited to developing tools, research, and other resources hosted on a dedicated BLCC website; conference presentations; dissemination of Building Local Continuums of Care (BLCC) research and resources with relevant national networks and funders; including BLCC progress updates and lessons learned in the NICJR annual report; and promoting BLCC through earned media, social media, and the NICJR email listserv. Following TTA conclusion, NICJR will analyze site outcomes; identify lessons learned; and develop and disseminate tools, research, and other resources based on this analysis.

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.