Safe Kids/Safe Streets--Community Approaches To Reducing Abuse and Neglect and Preventing Delinquency

This solicitation is the result of a collaborative effort among the offices and bureaus of the Office of Justice Programs (OJP). Acknowledging the correlation between child abuse and neglect and later violent delinquency and the need to improve system response, OJP set out to create a single program aimed at helping to break the cycle of early childhood victimization and later juvenile or adult criminality. Each of the OJP bureaus has in the past separately initiated programs in the area of childhood victimization. We of OJP are therefore particularly proud to be part of this unique partnership which, for the first time, pools the resources, experience, and expertise of all the OJP agencies.

The funding partners are: the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the Executive Office for Weed and Seed, and the Violence Against Women's Grants Office. Additional support is being provided by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, and the Office for Victims of Crime. See Appendix A (p. 47) for a history of this partnership; Appendix C (p. 53) describes OJP's bureau contributions.


Purpose: To reduce juvenile delinquency by helping break the cycle of child and adolescent abuse and neglect, thereby substantially reducing child maltreatment and fatalities and improving outcomes for children and families.

Background: Reports of child victimization, abuse, and neglect in the United States are daunting. In 1992 there were an estimated 2.2 million violent victimizations (murder, rape, robbery, assault) of children under age 18 (Snyder and Sickmund, 1995). Abuse statistics are similarly shocking. In 1994 alone an estimated 3.1 million children were reported to public welfare agencies for abuse or neglect. More than 1 million of those children were substantiated as victims (Wiese and Daro, 1995). Most often the abuse is inflicted by someone the child knows (Greenfeld, 1996), and the abuser is frequently a family member (Snyder, 1994).

Numerous studies cite the connection between abuse or neglect of a child and later develop- ment of violent and delinquent behavior (Thornberry, 1994; Wright and Wright, 1994; Widom, 1992). Research also suggests the efficacy of preventing abuse and neglect. David Olds of the University of Colorado Health Science Center has shown that prenatal and infancy home visits by nurses resulted in an 80-percent reduction in the rates of child maltreatment among at-risk families (Olds, 1986). This supports two assumptions that form the basis for many of the family strengthening strategies in use today. The first is that given means to do so most adults will provide safe homes for their children. The second is that one of the best ways of preventing delinquency and crime is to foster strong, nurturing families.

Understanding what can and should be done and even enacting legislative mandates does not mean that suitable and effective programs automatically become available. Indeed, although mental health services have been brought to victimized youth in juvenile court and programs such as parenting education and self-help groups for abusive parents have become more wide-spread, many single-strategy programs are of limited effect. To effect meaningful change, sustained multicomponent interventions are needed.

Complicating the problem of abuse by individuals is the manner in which children and adoles-cents are handled by the foster care and juvenile justice systems. In particular, minority children and adolescents are overrepresented in the foster care system in comparison with white child and adolescent victims of abuse and neglect (Folaron and Hess, 1993; Saunders et al., 1993; Walker et al., 1991; and Williams, 1989). Likewise, abused minority children disproportionately end up under the purview of the juvenile justice system, whereas troubled white children are provided support and services through the child welfare system. (One study, for example, found that older black children 12 and up who were physically abused were less likely than other children their age to have their situations investigated by child protective services [Sedlack, 1993].)

Goals: To encourage localities to restructure and strengthen the criminal and juvenile justice systems to be more comprehensive and proactive in helping children and adolescents and their families who have been or are at risk of being abused and neglected; to implement or strengthen coordinated management of abuse and neglect cases by improving policy and practice of the criminal and juvenile justice systems and the child welfare, family services, and related systems; and to develop comprehensive communitywide, cross-agency strategies to reduce child and adolescent abuse and neglect and resulting child fatalities.

Program Strategy: This solicitation is directed toward urban, rural, and tribal communities that are engaged in integrated, communitywide plans to ameliorate child abuse and resulting fatalities. The solicitation outlines a comprehensive program with four major components: (1) system reform and accountability, (2) continuum of services to protect children and support families, (3) data collection and evaluation, and (4) prevention education. Because of the challenging nature of the program, applications are invited only from jurisdictions that can demonstrate (1) a readiness and commitment to undertake system reform, (2) progress in assessing and addressing abuse and neglect, (3) the existing capacity to effect this major enterprise through a communitywide collaborative, and (4) the existence of policies and/or legislation that promote unified or family court approaches, encourage innovative reform of the justice and child welfare systems, and strengthen coordination between and integration of the two systems. It is important to understand that applications should not describe a com-pletely new effort proposed solely for this solicitation. Instead, proposed programs are to be firmly centered within larger community-based initiatives or plans underway in the applicant jurisdiction. Finally, applicants are encouraged to leverage this grant with other new or reallocated public/private funding.

Target Population: The target population for this program includes (1) children and adoles-cents at risk of abuse and neglect, (2) children and adolescents identified as abused and neglected, (3) abused and neglected children among the troubled and delinquent youth popu-lations who had not previously been so identified, and (4) supportive family members for the first three groups.

Program Elements:

  1. System Reform and Accountability. Jurisdictions are to engage in significant reforms to improve policies, practices, and services of the justice, child welfare, family services, and other related systems in preventing, identifying, and intervening in abuse and neglect cases; improving outcomes for abused children and adolescents and their families; and improving the accountability of offenders. Critical to that effort is comprehensive, ongoing, cross-discipline training. Practitioners especially, but also administrators and policymakers, need to be sensi-tized to the barriers to successful outcomes and knowledgeable about child development and abuse and neglect issues.

    The objectives of this program element are:

    1. To increase the ability of the multiple systems that interact with children, adolescents, and their families to prevent, identify, investigate, manage, and treat abuse and neglect and to ensure the accountability of offenders.

    2. To improve the ability of courts to effectively and productively adjudicate all cases relating to the abuse and neglect of children and adolescents.

    3. To improve the communication and relationships among citizens, the police, child protective workers, other professionals who deal with abuse, and the courts through the development of innovative partnering approaches, especially community policing.

    4. To ensure the existence and effectiveness of nonstigmatizing community mechanisms for identifying and delivering services to victims and to those at risk of either abusing or being abused.

    5. To promptly identify and assess needs of victimized and at-risk children and adoles-cents and their families.

    6. To strengthen the capabilities of professionals at all levels of the agencies responding to abuse and neglect and to ensure that the community's policymakers, agency and program administrators, and especially its practitioners are representative of the whole community and reflect the ethnic and cultural backgrounds of the children and families they serve.

  2. Continuum of Services To Protect Children and Support Families. Jurisdictions are to develop and/or strengthen a continuum of family strengthening and support services targeting adjudicated and at-risk children and their families to ensure the safety of children and adolescents and to provide support to their families in meeting the developmental needs of their children.

    The objectives of this program element are:

    1. To identify gaps in providing a full range of identification, assessment, mental health, victim assistance, and family support services.

    2. To develop, initiate, or expand needed services, especially prevention and early intervention programs such as home visitation.

    3. To improve the delivery and expansion of services to underserved and rural areas through the use of new technologies, trained practitioners, and satellite offices.

    4. To identify ways that current services and resources can be redeployed, public and private funding reallocated, and other resources leveraged to support at-risk children, adolescents, and families.

    5. To identify and make use of grassroots organizations, religious institutions, and informal networks such as extended families in the assessment and delivery of family services.

    6. To amend policies and practices that prevent the community from implementing the prior objectives.

  3. Data Collection and Evaluation. Jurisdictions are to ensure that quality data are collected and used, that a local evaluation is conducted, and that collaboration with both other sites and a national evaluation grantee is undertaken. Jurisdictions are also to ensure the compatibility of the data collected on the various components of the justice, child welfare, and other involved systems as well as on the family. The exchange of such data among system components should be fostered to achieve expedient yet complete adjudication of abuse and neglect cases. Collaboration for the evaluation should include adjustments in data collection and evaluation protocols that will permit measurement of processes and outcomes across sites, where this is possible.

    The objectives of this program element are:

    1. To improve information sharing across systems and agencies relative to the management of abuse and neglect cases and to put into effect uniform data collection standards and shared measures for reporting and intake.

    2. To conduct a local evaluation of practices and outcomes to determine whether a communitywide, interdisciplinary response is making a positive difference for victims and their families and to evaluate the effectiveness of providing prevention and early intervention services tailored to families' particular needs.

    3. To implement assessment protocols for determining system strengths and weaknesses.

    4. To participate fully in a national evaluation of this program.

  4. Prevention Education and Public Information. Jurisdictions are to conduct broad-based, multimedia information and prevention education campaigns to increase general awareness of how to report abuse and prevent harm to children, acquaint community residents with services and initiatives resulting from the program, and educate current and prospective parenting adults about behaviors that can indicate or trigger abuse, and about nonviolent, nurturing ways to manage child behavior.

    The objectives of this program element are:

    1. To educate community residents, particularly current and prospective parenting adults; enlarge their understanding of abuse and neglect; equip them with strategies and tools to positively manage their responses to internal and external triggers of abuse; and assist them in reporting suspected abuse.

    2. To decrease community tolerance of abuse and neglect and increase the capacity of the community to support child and adolescent victims and their families.

Products: During the planning phase, applicants are to develop the following products:

Eligibility Requirements: This solicitation is open to all communities. Local units of govern-ment, States agencies, and nonprofit agencies may apply on behalf of a community that does not qualify as a unit of local government or combination thereof, to serve as the applicant agency of a community collaboration. Preference will be give to communities with an operating children's advocacy center or other child-centered multidisciplinary program designed to improve the community's response to abuse or neglect, to communities with a Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) program or similar child advocacy program, and to communities that contain a Weed and Seed neighborhood.

At least one award each will be made to a qualifying community with a Weed and Seed site and to a qualifying rural or tribal community.

Selection Criteria: All applicants will be evaluated and rated based on the extent to which the applications meet the criteria outlined below.

Problem(s) To Be Addressed (15 points)

Outline the scope and nature of child and adolescent abuse and neglect in the applicant juris-diction and describe the applicant community and the target population. Provide justification for the proposed effort based on a community assessment process. Delineate and prioritize the major issues related to ameliorating abuse and neglect within the applicant community. These might include, for example, ethnic and cultural considerations, identification and assessment, availability of services, and case management processes. Discuss the problems of communitywide/cross-agency collaboration and demonstrate that the applicant has both engaged the appropriate stakeholders in its planning process and possesses a clear understanding of the processes, supports, and impediments to community collaboration.

Goals and Objectives (15 points)

Outline the applicant's vision for ameliorating abuse and neglect, describing how the involved systems and agencies will operate upon conclusion of the planning and implementation phases. Provide goals and specific measurable objectives for the planning process. At a minimum, these objectives will address the priority issues delineated in the Problem(s) To Be Addressed section, the solicitation's goals, program elements and objectives, and the planning process as it supports achievement of the solicitation's goals and objectives.

Project Design (15 points)

  1. Describe the intended planning process and detail the major activities that will be undertaken in the development of the implementation plan. Include a timeline of major planning period events in Appendix F (discussed below). Describe how proposed plans will build on and/or fit within current and past communitywide planning processes to achieve the solicitation's objectives. (Sites containing Weed and Seed neighborhoods, for example, are to show how their plans make use of Weed and Seed strategies to address child/adolescent abuse and neglect communitywide.) For all applicants this can be shown in a number of ways:

  2. Describe in detail (activities, responsibilities, due dates) plans to develop the required products described above or current progress in developing the products.

  3. Indicate how proposed plans address or will address the multiethnic, multicultural, and gender-specific considerations for meeting the needs of abused and at-risk children, adolescents, and their families. The description should convey a clear understanding of those considerations and issues.

  4. With respect to data collection and evaluation, selected sites will work with the national evaluator to identify specific variables or indicators by which to measure process, performance, and outcomes of the whole initiative and of selected component pro-grams. The set of measures will include some variables that can be compared across sites. In this section each site is to describe how it proposes to work with the national evaluator to develop the variables.

    Applicants are also to describe how they intend to evaluate their efforts. The purpose of the local evaluation is to document through qualitative and quantitative measures the implementation processes and key factors affecting success and the efficacy of specific program components and to determine the impact of the program.

Management and Organizational Capability (30 points)

Applicants should use this section to describe a sound governance structure capable of carrying out the proposed initiative and to demonstrate the following:

  1. Readiness to reform. Discuss the community's history of collaboration and planning as it addressed or addresses abuse and neglect. Include a description of the participants, major milestones, and the process of assessment. Clarify what has been done, what is in process, and what remains to be done. Note any training or technical assistance that has been received.

  2. Capacity to sustain and build a community collaborative. Demonstrate the existence, viability, and accomplishments to date of multidisciplinary arrangements whereby various agencies in a jurisdiction are working cooperatively or collaboratively to improve the community's response to child abuse and neglect. Descriptions should answer the following questions:

    Applicants also must document that the collaborative or cooperative groups represent all the relevant stakeholders needed to reduce the incidence of abuse and neglect in the community. The documentation should provide answers to the following questions:

    Finally, jurisdictions are to identify and include, in the planning and implementation phases, atypical resources and stakeholders including grassroots organizations, local bar associations, religious institutions, and local chapters of national organizations such as, but not limited to, the National Parent-Teachers Association, the Congress of National Black Churches, the Junior League, the Boys & Girls Clubs, the National Urban League, 4-H Clubs, and the National Coalition of Hispanic Health and Human Services.

  3. Evidence of favorable policies and/or legislation. Characterize the political and admin-istrative environments and give evidence of political or administrative support for the proposed community-based planning effort to combat child abuse and neglect. Give examples of actual favorable policies or legislation in Appendix D (discussed below).

  4. Evidence of economic well-being. Establish either the existence of a sound local economy or the current infusion of substantial public and/or private resources to improve the community's economy. The latter could be shown through designation as an Enterprise Community/Empowerment Zone.

In demonstrating that the collaborative and governance structures form an infrastructure capable of carrying out the project outlined in this solicitation, applicants are also to:

Budget (10 points)

Applicants are to provide a budget that is reasonable, allowable, and cost effective in relation to the activities proposed; identify all costs and justify them in the budget narrative; and explain specifically how costs are determined. Applicants are also to identify all assistance that will be used to leverage this award, indicating the source and amount of funds.

Applicants from rural or tribal communities (refer to footnote #2) are to budget for up to $425,000 for planning and implementation activities for the initial 18-month budget period, while urban applicants are to budget for up to $925,000. For each budget, up to $75,000 is to be designated for planning. However, with appropriate justification and demonstrated need, additional funds may be requested for planning activities. Once the planning phase has been completed and the plan approved, the balance of implementation funds for the initial budget period will be released.

Applicants are to provide specific and detailed planning budget figures and supporting budget narrative. The remainder of the award funds ($350,000 for rural/tribal communities and $850,000 for urban communities) should be designated for implementation activities. OJP recognizes that the implementation portion of the budget will need to be preliminary because the selected jurisdictions will develop detailed implementation budgets during the planning phase. The budget narrative must clearly and comprehensively describe the activities and strategies proposed and the persons or agencies responsible for its implementation.

For both the planning and implementation portions of the budget, applicants are to (1) include component project budgets from each of the participating agencies or groups, (2) show how award funds will be distributed to members of the applicant group in concert with the overall proposal, and (3) account for travel funds to enable two to three people to attend up to three meetings with the funding agencies and other funded sites during the planning period and up to two each year during the implementation phase. Given the complexity of the solicited pro- gram, it is suggested that applicants assign one experienced, high-level person full time to manage the planning collaborative. Applicants should also allocate funds to enable one or more persons within the core systems to devote substantial time to coordinating efforts within their respective agencies. Similar initiatives have found the use of an outside facilitator essential to keeping the planning process moving.

As further evidence of commitment and capability, applicants are encouraged to leverage this award with other funds. Preference will be given to communities that leverage this award and that describe how they would similarly leverage the implementation award. The applicant must show the amount and source of any leveraged money commitments and note whether the funds are reallocated or new. Reallocated funds can be local, State, or other Federal funds directed to this initiative. Sources of leveraged funds might include local taxes, public funds, alcohol and other drug prevention monies, Family Preservation and Support grants, family violence grants, youth development funds, and others.

Appendixes (15 points)

To help gauge the likelihood of grantee success, applicants are to submit the following appendixes as evidence of their readiness and potential:

Appendix A. Resource directory. This is a listing of local services to children and adolescents and their families in the area of child abuse and neglect. At a minimum, it has provider names, addresses, phone numbers, and a brief description of the services offered.

Appendix B. Cross-system protocols. These are interagency agreements and protocols outlining a multidisciplinary approach to the investigation and prosecution of child abuse and neglect cases, case management and tracking, and provision of services and treatment to child and adolescent victims and their families. At a minimum, such agreements will be among the police department, the child welfare system, the prosecutor's office, and the appropriate medical and mental health agencies. Agree-ments and protocols that include the criminal and juvenile courts, the offices of the corporation counsel, the prosecutor, the school system, and victim's services and advocates will further enhance the application. (To meet page limitations, applicants may provide a bibliography of protocols and interagency agreements that includes date(s) of agreement/effective date(s) and selected, relevant pages as evidence of the applicability of the documents to this effort.)

Appendix C. Statement of collaborative application. It is imperative that the plan be a mutual submission by all stakeholders. As evidence, submit a statement asserting that each party signing was substantially involved in the development of the plan. The statement must contain each person's original signature, typed/printed name, address, telephone number, and affiliation (title and agency or role e.g., parent, block leader).

Appendix D. Evidence of favorable policies and/or legislation. Applicants are to document the existence of a favorable climate by listing current agency policies or local or State legislation that aids interagency, communitywide collaboration in regard to abuse and neglect or related issues. As with Appendix B, applicants may choose to do this by providing a bibliography of policies and legislation that includes effective date(s) along with selected, relevant pages.

Appendix E. Key staff resumes. Include r�sum�s or brief descriptions of the relevant experience of key staff named in the "Management and Organizational Capability" section.

Appendix F. Timeline of major project activities.

Format: The narrative must not exceed 25 pages in length (excluding forms, assurances, and appendixes) and must be submitted on 8 1/2- by 11-inch paper, double-spaced on one side of the paper in a standard 10- or 12-point font. Appendixes B-F in total cannot exceed 20 pages.

Award Period: This project will be funded initially for an 18-month budget period for Phase I of a 66-month project period. Funding in the second and subsequent budget periods will depend on grantee performance, availability of funds, and other criteria established at the time of the award.

Award Amount: Up to $2.7 million is available for three to six cooperative agreements. The initial awards will range from approximately $425,000 (rural/tribal sites) to $925,000 (urban sites) each for an initial 18-month budget period of a 66-month project period. Once the planning phase has been completed and the plan approved, the balance of implementation funds for the initial budget period will be released.

The amount of implementation funds to be awarded under future budget periods is contingent upon the quality and viability of implementation plans, compliance with the terms and conditions of the grant award, the amount of leveraged funds available for implementation, and the availability of funds for award under this program.

Delivery Instructions: All application packages must be mailed or delivered to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, c/o Juvenile Justice Resource Center, 1600 Research Boulevard, Mail Stop 2K, Rockville, MD 20850; 301 251 5535. Note: In the lower left-hand corner of the envelope, you must clearly write "Safe Kids/Safe Streets Community Approaches To Reducing Abuse and Neglect and Preventing Delinquency."

Due Date: Applicants are responsible for ensuring that the original and five copies of the application package are received by 5 p.m. EDT on September 9, 1996.

Contact: For further information call Robin V. Delany-Shabazz, 202 307 9963, or send an e-mail inquiry to [email protected].

Appendix A--Genesis of the Solicitation

Development of this solicitation was begun during the summer of 1995. Acknowledging the correlation between child abuse and neglect and later violent delinquency and the need to redress systemic deficiencies, several offices and bureaus of the OJP set out to create a single program aimed at helping to break the cycle between early childhood victimization and later juvenile or adult criminality. The agencies involved are the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), the Executive Office for Weed and Seed, the Violence Against Women's Grants Office, the Office for Victims of Crime, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and the National Institute of Justice.

The first step was to convene a focus group from a range of disciplines including policing, prosecution, children's advocacy, medicine, and psychology to marshal the latest thinking drawn from research, practice, and policy to help outline a solicitation for an effective response to child victimization. OJJDP staff augmented the information obtained through the focus group by conducting additional interviews and administering questionnaires to more than 50 other professionals, parents, and victims.

The respondents concurred in recommending a comprehensive, community-based, and interdisciplinary approach to diminishing the incidence of child and adolescent abuse. Solutions, they said, must be developed from the ground up, albeit with Federal and State assistance, with multi/interdisciplinary teaming making a critical difference in effectiveness and impact. Partnerships among law enforcement, prosecution, the courts, victim advocates and service providers, schools, corrections, hospitals, and especially families were cited as essential to reducing and preventing child and adolescent abuse.

The group identified four core components to any multi/interdisciplinary child and adolescent abuse program, which led to the development of the four major program elements: (1) directing resources to reform and improve community systems to meet the needs of children and families; (2) building a web of strong and responsive community supports; (3) developing seamless systems of data collection, analysis, and evaluation to improve system operation and make systems and programs accountable for results; and (4) advancing public education as an important aspect of prevention. Participants told OJP the following:

It is broken: fix it. Practitioners said, "The systems are broken: they don't need tinkering, they need reform." They urged streamlining and expediting the processing of cases and improving the exchange of information among the dependency, juvenile, and criminal justice systems. Better linkages between the criminal and juvenile justice system and the child welfare system are important to ensure that efforts are not duplicative and that they do not undermine proper disposition of a case or further victimize the abused or neglected child. Similarly, improved coordination and communication among judicial, correctional, child protection, victim assistance, health, and mental health agencies are key to ensuring that needed health and mental health services are available to victims. Equally critical is ensuring that family mem-bers and offenders participate in prescribed, court-ordered rehabilitation and treatment services.

Reform also means orienting children and families to the justice system and keeping them informed of case events, establishing specialized prosecutors and prosecution units dedicated to child abuse and child fatality review teams, promoting police training in community policing techniques relating to child abuse, and initiating retraining and cross-discipline training for all frontline workers. It is also important that all training acknowledge the need for and develop culturally sensitive practices.

Importantly, system reform efforts need to be predicated on official recognition by policy-makers and decisionmakers that child abuse and partner abuse can occur simultaneously within a family and that both are often anchored in a complex constellation of problems alcohol and substance abuse, teen parenting, joblessness and lack of job skills, homelessness, and other problems. To be effective the response of community systems must be comprehensive. This is another element driving the need to have the multiple service providers collaborate and the need to center the system response on families. Success is also predicated on the meaningful involvement of parenting adults and able victims in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of programs.

Families first. OJP was told that, although system reform was critical, it was only half the solution. Reform, the group insisted, has to be paired with availability of quality services for children, adolescents, and families. They pointed out that, above all, emphasis needs to be put on preventive, family-focused, community-based initiatives. They stressed that succeeding with at-risk and abused children and adolescents requires early identification and comprehen-sive, individual needs assessments. It also requires quick availability of therapeutic, educa-tional, and family support services. Not only does intervention need to occur early, it needs to continue long after the child's and/or family's formal relationship typically ends with the juvenile, child welfare, or family services agencies. Interventions also need to be culturally relevant, sensitive, and provided in nonstigmatizing ways.

Success also requires better outreach and service provision to rural communities; programs focusing on assisting young men who may themselves have been victims of child and adolescent abuse to become better fathers and role models; reemphasis on abused adolescents; and victim assistance services for children and families that inform, prepare, and assist children and their families to participate in the case proceedings. Practitioners underscored the value of the often-overlooked informal networks and support systems that exist in communities (extended families, storefront churches, and grassroots and ad hoc programs). They said these were effective and trusted mechanisms to assist families and abuse victims and advised OJP to insist that formal community institutions learn more about and partner with these nonadver-sarial supports to extend and supplement their outreach.

Plug the information gap. The group told OJP that communities need to do a better job of gathering and analyzing information on abuse. Simply knowing how many child and adolescent abuse victims there are and what happens to them as they are handed from one system to the next is beyond the capability of many jurisdictions. Thus, a critical strategy is to improve, mechanize, and standardize data collection. This is pivotal for the courts, child welfare systems, probation and intake systems, and abuse reporting agencies (schools, for example) to share information across systems. Such management information systems need to be designed so that jurisdictions, too, can share case information (to improve tracking people who move) and share outcomes and strategies.

The respondents also said, "We need to know what works" and so urged an emphasis on program evaluation. Program evaluation would not be complete, they noted, unless it embraced the consumers' perspective--that is, unless the viewpoints of victims and their families are taken into account.

Make media a prevention partner. Respondents stressed the importance of public education. Raising community awareness and educating current and prospective parenting adults through mass media are strategies that unify and reinforce the other program elements. An important component of prevention education, they noted, is to institute child rearing education in schools starting at the elementary level. Communities should be innovative in getting information out. They should disseminate materials through police agencies, community organizations, hospital emergency rooms, doctors' offices, social service offices, clinics, shopping malls, and grocery stores.

Appendix B--Training and Technical Assistance to Sites

During the planning period, current Office of Justice Programs (OJP) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) providers of training and technical assistance will be made available to assist the selected sites and to provide them with resources to develop their implementation plan. Among these are the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (system reform and practitioner training); National CASA Association (victim advocacy, system improvement); the National Network of Children's Advocacy Centers and the Regional Children's Advocacy Centers (training in multidisciplinary approaches, team-building, and interagency collaboration); the Strengthening America's Families project and the training and technical assistance resource centers of the Children's Bureau at HHS (family strengthening services assessment and implementation); the National Center for the Prosecution of Child Abuse (practitioner training); Parents Anonymous (parent leadership and involvement); and the OJJDP National Training and Technical Assistance Center (cultural awareness/competence training).

Appendix C--Office of Justice Programs Bureau Contributions

OJJDP, the Office of Justice Programs' Executive Office for Weed and Seed, and the Violence Against Women Grants Office have provided funding for the planning and implementation phases of this program. In addition, the following OJP bureaus will assist selected sites in the design, implementation, and evaluation of their efforts:

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