National Community Courts Training and Technical Assistance Initiative

Justice Innovation Inc., doing business as the Center for Justice Innovation (Center), formerly Center for Court Innovation, seeks $1,142,494 to serve as a training and technical assistance (TTA) provider under BJA's National Community Courts Training and Technical Assistance Initiative, per the FY23 Invitation to Apply for Administrative Funding Adjustments to Previously Funded Awards. The Center created the world’s first community court in 1993 and has since planned, implemented, and operated several other award-winning community courts in the New York area. Since 2010, the Center has served as BJA’s national training and technical assistance provider for community courts.

The Center will implement the following objectives, among others described more fully in the program narrative:

Provide continued support to FY 2020 grant recipients. Center staff will provide ongoing assistance to grantees’ progress toward goals and objectives by disseminating information about best practices and lessons learned, troubleshooting operational challenges, facilitating peer and subject matter connections, and providing ongoing recommendations on data tracking and evaluation strategies to support successful project management.
Provide TTA to a new cohort of up to eight FY 2022 Community Court Sites. Services will include conducting TTA needs assessments during each site’s planning phase, providing on-site and remote TTA to support project implementation or expansion, facilitating peer-to-peer consultations through the national network, assisting grantees in disseminating information about their projects within their communities, and helping grantees build effective data management and evaluation capacity.
Support regional meetings to educate and engage the field on community justice practices. The Center will convene in-person and remote workshops for judges, court administrators, lawyers, law enforcement, service providers, probation agencies, as well as community members, community court practitioners and justice system leaders who are interested in discussing challenges in the field and exploring best practices to advance community courts nationally. The Center will leverage the regional mentor court network to support this objective.

The service area will be nationwide, and the beneficiaries will be jurisdictions seeking to implement or enhance community court programs as well as the field at large.