A New Approach to Technical Assistance Delivery for Restorative Justice Diversion

Equal Justice USA’s (EJUSA) project “A New Approach to Technical Assistance Delivery for Restorative Justice Diversion” will deliver and evaluate a new training and technical assistance (TTA) strategy for pre-prosecution restorative justice diversion (RJD) programs focused on youth and young adults. This project will build capacity and readiness among community-based organizations led by people of color, along with local systems partners, to launch restorative justice diversion programs in their own communities. 

The main objectives are to document and disseminate lessons learned about RJD from an existing group of RJD partners, expand virtual TTA opportunities for new sites exploring pre-prosecution RJD for youth and young adults, and evaluate the RJD technical assistance delivery method. Primary grant activities include exploring the lessons learned from other sites who have implemented RJD; developing a robust online TTA workshop curriculum; delivering two nine-month online TTA pilot workshops to eight new partner sites; planning and facilitating two in-person convenings for participating sites; and evaluating this new blended strategy in comparison to a one-to-one, in-person approach to RJD TTA. 

This grant project will address a precipitous increase in crime and/or type of crime by using pre-prosecution RJD to target and reduce felony and/or other high-level types of serious crimes committed by youth and young adults. There is growing evidence that shows this approach is associated with much lower rates of recidivism, provides accountability, and promotes healing among survivors. EJUSA’s pre-prosecution RJD model also responds to persistent racial injustice in the criminal justice system by prioritizing sites led by people of color and formerly systems-impact people and tailoring the program design to promote racial equity. EJUSA seeks priority consideration 1(A); documentation of plans to respond to priority consideration can be found on pages 8-9 of EJUSA’s proposal narrative. The project will address the following allowable uses/activities: accelerating justice through the creation of approaches and tools that build the capacity to gather and analyze information to understand key decision points and levers for change (50% of budget) and building alternative strategies and systems such as restorative justice approaches and diversion to enhance better outcomes for those in the criminal justice system (50% of budget).
This award is funded as an administrative funding adjustment of 15PBJA-22-GK-04590-MUMU.