OJJDP FY07 Substance Abuse Prevention and Intervention Program for Youth at High-Risk for Juvenile Crime and their Families

The Phoenix House of Texas, Inc. proposes a multi-disciplinary collaborative project that includes several community partners including the Harris County Juvenile Justice Alternative Education Program (JJAEP), the Houston Public Housing Authority, Houston WorkSourse and Phoenix House. The project's goal is to reduce substance abuse in the target population, strengthen the families of youth, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the community collaboration as an intervention approach. This partnership-building model has been designed for practical service delivery advancing the program's current model and using well documented research-based substance abuse prevention and intervention models that are available to the general public: Karol Kumpfer's Strengthening Families and Steve Sussman's Project Towards No Drug Abuse.

The inclusion of the Department of Labor's WorkSource tools and skills will give the youth and their family opportunities for positive community connections, employment, and a better future. Community connections with home and school will be established through the participation of the Housing Authority and the Juvenile Justice Alternative Education Program's Charter School. Goals of this project include improving system effectiveness by training staff on the selected prevention and intervention models and developing a community collaborative coalition that includes the juvenile, the family, the school, and other community participants. Additional goals include enhancing organizational capacity through staff participation in rigorous program training and program implementation guided by on-going supervision and process evaluation; maintaining on-going process evaluation guidance to insure fidelity and the scientific integrity of the program design; and documenting process and outcome data and findings in a final report suitable for publication and for publishable articles concerning reducing substance abuse and juvenile crime. CA/NCF