Urban Children Are Really Essential (U-CARE) Program

The Urban Dreams U-CARE (Urban Children Are Really Essential) Project works with high-risk urban youth in the following Iowa communities: Des Moines, Sioux City, Waterloo, Iowa City, Charles City, and Fort Dodge. The coordination of this statewide project is focused on the implementation of local programs that provide direct prevention services, high-risk youth intervention services, and/or systems improvement projects to increase the local capacity to serve targeted youth. The goal of the Urban Dreams U-Care Project is to lower disproportionate minority contact (DM) rates within the juvenile justice system through increasing systems' capacity to leverage internal resources to sustain innovative, best-practice programming. The program proposes to enhance the development of collaborative partnerships with community-based entities and institutions to provide services and systems-based projects. The statewide infrastructure will be utilized to manage the communications, policies, quality assurance, and expansion of evidence-based services. Specific performance measures for each of the targeted communities have been defined, however, performance measures for aggregate project objectives include: 90% of participating youth will not offend or re-offend over a 12 month period.
NCA/NCF