3. Joint Efforts to Educate and Assist Key Stakeholders at the State and Local Levels

The risk- and protection-focused approach to planning and implementing delinquency prevention programs serves as part of the foundation for the Coordinating Council's Action Plan. OJJDP and other members of the Coordinating Council have worked to ensure that State and local grant programs are based on this approach through training, technical assistance, and the development of inter-agency educational materials. In support of OJJDP and its Federal partners' missions, OJJDP entered into three new collaborative efforts to provide training specifically on the risk- and protection-focused approach to prevention.

The first collaborative effort, Partners in Prevention and Treatment of Youth Violence, seeks to foster interagency collaboration at the Federal, State, and local levels for the purpose of enhancing violence prevention and intervention services for youth and their families. In partnership with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's (SAMHSA) Center for Substance Abuse Prevention and Center for Mental Health Services, the Health Resources and Services Administration's Maternal and Child Health Bureau, and the Department of Education's Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program, OJJDP sponsored national training for the leaders of State child-serving systems. The focus of the training was to provide knowledge, skills, and technical assistance to help States develop comprehensive plans to reduce youth violence using a risk- and protection-focused model.

The second collaborative effort brings together representatives from OJJDP, SAMHSA, and the Child Welfare League to address the needs of chemically-involved youth and their families. The training program-Strengthening Services for Chemically-Involved Children, Youth, and their Families-is designed to help child welfare professionals identify the needs of families with alcohol and other drug abuse problems using comprehensive risk and needs assessments and collaboration with other child-focused agencies, organizations, and service providers.

The third collaborative training initiative, Safe Start: Child Development-Community Policing (CD-CP), is the result of a joint effort between OJJDP, the Violence Against Women Grants Office, and the Office for Victims of Crime. The Safe Start CD-CP initiative provides training and technical assistance to law enforcement and mental health professionals on a child-centered community policing model. The model involves collaboration between law enforcement and mental health professionals to address the psychological burdens on children and families exposed to violence. The training and technical assistance, offered nationally, provide community-based police officers with clinical knowledge to help children and families in crisis and allow clinicians to address the needs of children who previously would not have come to the attention of mental health service providers. OJJDP also supports the implementation of the model in four cities.

In addition to these new initiatives, other jointly-funded programs, such as Weed and Seed, SafeFutures, Safe Kids/Safe Streets, Local Strategic Plans Initiative, Comprehensive Communities Program, and Pulling America's Communities Together, continue to offer training and technical assistance to grantees to help them plan, implement, and evaluate their delinquency prevention programs. The training and technical assistance provide grantees with a framework for developingcomprehensive, locally-defined, research-based risk-and protection-focused prevention programs. Other grant programs that include this type of training are the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Drug Elimination Program, the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention's Community Partnership Demonstration and Community Coalitions Programs, and the National Funding Collaborative on Violence Prevention.

OJJDP also disseminates educational materials for State and local governments and communities that aid in the development and implementation of delinquency prevention programs. During fiscal year 1997, OJJDP worked closely with various offices within the U.S. Department of Education to develop educational materials for educators, school administrators, and other community-based and youth-serving professionals. These materials included publications that provide guidance on identifying and providing delinquency prevention services to youth who are not in the educational mainstream, guides on the implementation of conflict resolution education programs and information sharing, and a hate/bias crime prevention curriculum.