OJJDP's State and Community Development Awards program was established to provide grants and cooperative agreements to organizations that OJJDP has selected for funds in prior years. This program has been authorized by an Act appropriating funds for the Department of Justice.
The Attorney General's Children Exposed to Violence Demonstration Program develops and supports comprehensive community-based strategic planning and implementation efforts to prevent and reduce the impact of children's exposure to violence in their homes, schools, and communities.
Multnomah County's Defending Childhood Initiative's vision is to make Multnomah County safer for all children and youth in our community by addressing children's exposure to all forms of violence. Goals include raising awareness of children's exposure to violence; building capacity to recognize, respond to and mitigate its impact; advancing scientific inquiry in addressing exposure to violence and associated risk and protective factors to contribute to generalizable knowledge; and supporting evidence-based approaches to prevention, identification and intervention.
Phase 4 activities will achieve these goals through increased staffing capacity, enhanced training efforts, contracted services, collaboration, evaluation, research, and community engagement.
Efforts will focus on families at high risk for children's exposure to violence, including those exposed to domestic violence and gang or youth violence; children and families impacted by domestic violence within early childhood systems such as Head Start; youth engaged in activities through the Multnomah Youth Commission; youth participating in the YES! youth development program; and children and youth in participating school districts.
Contracted domestic violence family advocates will increase capacity of early childhood systems to recognize and respond to domestic violence while providing advocacy services to impacted families within those systems. Community Health Workers will engage youth and their communities through a robust array of prevention and awareness raising activities, including research to advance general knowledge of community level risk and resiliency. Increased staff capacity will expand our work with school districts to develop and pilot a tiered training plan for school counselors, incorporating a train-the-trainer model. One additional research staff, as well as a part-time program assistant, will both increase capacity to evaluate local Defending Childhood programming, design and execute research to advance general understanding across several project areas, and further coordinate the alignment of efforts, across multiple sectors, to promote resiliency among children exposed to violence.
Progress measurements have been designed, in collaboration with partners, to meet the reporting requirements of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. In addition to project evaluation, grant funds will be used to gather data that contributes to generalizable knowledge.
NCA/NCF
