"Bright Futures" Tribal Youth Program

The Justice Department's grant-making components have created a streamlined approach for federally recognized Tribes, Tribal consortia, Alaska Native villages and corporations, as well as authorized tribal designees to apply for Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 funding opportunities. The Coordinated Tribal Assistance Solicitation (CTAS) serves as a single solicitation for existing tribal government-specific grant programs administered by the Office of Justice Programs (OJP), the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) and the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW). The CTAS solicitation is designed to assist tribes with addressing crime and public safety issues in a comprehensive manner. The CTAS grant-application process was inspired by and developed after consultation with tribal leaders, including sessions at the Justice Department's Tribal Nations Listening Session in 2009, and has been updated based on continued tribal consultations and listening sessions.

The Cherokee Nation will implement an in-home intervention program targeting Native American youth ages 5 - 17 who reside in Adair County, OK and their families. The overall goals of this project are to keep the youth in school (reduce truancy), prevent them from entering into the juvenile justice system (prevent first offenders), intervene with status offenders as early as possible (prevent re-offenders) and hold not just the juvenile accountable, but also the parents. By providing intensive in-home skill building and educational services to these youth and families, the Tribe hopes to keep the youth in their home community as productive, contributing citizens. This project will provide a wide array of services individualized for each family. Youth will be identified by the school through their low or declining school attendance (truancy). The program will serve a total of 50 youth (combined long term and short term clients) for the first year, 60 youth the second year, and 75 youth for the third year. A formative and summative evaluation plan will be developed and will collect data necessary not only to measure the extent to which objectives were met, but also to view the model as a whole with respect to effectiveness with Native American children.

CA/NCF