U-CARE (Urban Children Are Really Essential) Program

The OJJDP FY 09 Earmarks Programs further the Department's mission by providing grants, cooperative agreements, and other assistance authorized by the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, as amended, to organizations identified in the Explanatory Statement Regarding H.R. 1105 (Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009), 155 Cong. Rec. H1653 (daily ed. Feb. 23, 2009) (statement by Rep. Obey, Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations of the House).

The Urban Dreams' U-CARE (Urban Children Are Really Essential) will continue to work with the at-risk youth in Des Moines, Waterloo, Iowa City, and Ames, Iowa. The program has begun plans to expand nationally to communities in Washington, D.C.; Raleigh, NC; Dayton, OH, and Los Angeles, CA. They will continue to focus on program development and implementation of the local programs that provide direct prevention services, high-risk youth intervention services, and/or systems improvement projects to increase local capacity to serve targeted youth. The goal of the project is to lower disproportionate minority contact (DMC) rates with the juvenile justice system through increasing systems' capacity to leverage internal resources to sustain innovative, best-practice programming. Urban Dreams U-CARE will utilize the DMC evidence-based model that uses research to determine the number of juveniles in the justice system or on their way, divided by the number of juveniles in the State of Iowa. The analytic model developed by Feyerherm and colleagues was refined during the OJJDP DMC initiative. NCA/NCF