FY 2021 Justice Reinvestment Initiative Funding Opportunities

DARYL FOX: Good afternoon, everyone and welcome to today’s webinar, FY 2021 Justice Reinvestment Initiative Funding Opportunities, hosted by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. At this time, I’d like to introduce today’s presenters, Heather Tubman-Carbone, Ph.D., and Rachel Brushett, Ph.D., both senior policy advisers with the Bureau of Justice Assistance. Heather’s going to be starting things off today. Heather?

HEATHER TUBMAN-CARBONE: Good afternoon, everyone. I am Heather Tubman-Carbone from BJA and as you heard, I am joined by my colleague Dr. Rachel Brushett. Together, we manage the Justice Reinvestment Initiative. Today, we’ll start with a quick overview of JRI as we call it, and this year’s funding opportunity, and then we’ll get into the details of each solicitation. We’ll start with a state level training and technical assistance program and then we’ll move into what we call the site-based solicitation, reducing crime by improving justice system performance. For each solicitation, we’ll cover the purpose, objectives, and deliverables. Rachel will get us started.

RACHEL BRUSHETT: Thank you so much, Heather, and good afternoon everyone. Apologies, getting myself sorted very quickly. As you all are likely aware, BJA is part of the Office of Justice Programs at the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice is committed to advancing work that promotes civil rights, increases access to justice, supports crime victims, protects the public from crime and evolving threats, and builds trust between law enforcement and the community. BJA’s goal in the field is to provide leadership and services in grant administration and criminal justice policy development to support local, state, and tribal justice strategies to achieve safer communities. For fiscal 2021, Congress appropriated $33 million to assist states in implementing data-driven strategies to improve public safety. A key program in BJA to support states is the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, also known as JRI. JRI is an intensive data-driven approach that helps states, jurisdictions identify the key drivers of crime and understand how they use resources to address these issues. The resulting information allows stakeholders to improve their capacity to prevent and respond to crime by knowing how to reallocate their resources into high-performing crime and recidivism reduction efforts. As you can see from this graphic here, JRI is a two-part process that has been applied to states across the nation and looks a little different in every place. While the actual engagement is customized to the unique situation and needs of a given jurisdiction, the core components of the process are the same across all engagement. The first phase is research and development, that’s what you see here in the blue. During this phase, a workgroup is assembled, data analysis is conducted, stakeholders are engaged, and policy and practice responses are identified and proposed. In the second phase, in the green-orange here, following either changes made in either administrative policy or legislation, we move into implementation. In this phase, policies are implemented and the impact of enacted policies and procedures is monitored. As you can see, in a large number of states across the country that have used Justice Reinvestment to implement a range of individualized policy and practice changes and to change the way they do business. Engaging in the JRI process has allowed these jurisdictions to do the following: conduct intensive and objective agency-spanning data analysis; comprehensively examine their systems, engaging everyone from law enforcement to parole officers; build the collaboration necessary to examine data on a state-wide level while taking into account all aspects of the criminal justice system, including local perspective; craft innovative and data-driven approaches to improve public safety; identify and align state and local resources to fight violent crime; improve collaboration between behavioral health and justice system actors; address victim needs and community safety in policies; and increase public safety while still holding people accountable. To date, Justice Reinvestment as a statewide initiative had had a significant impact. More than 36 states have used Justice Reinvestment and to date they have averted or saved more than $1 billion, reinvested more than $500 million in strategies to improve outcomes, averted prison population growth by more than 70,000 people, and reduced prison populations by more than 18,000. Marrying Congress’ intentions and the administration’s priorities, this year’s JRI funding opportunity is focused on helping state governments apply the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, this data-driven problem-solving analysis and evidence-based solution implementation to improve public safety. The program furthers the department’s mission to reduce crime and recidivism by helping states more efficiently and equitably allocate resources to impact systems. As Heather mentioned, there are two funding opportunities available this year, in fiscal year 2021. The first solicitation is a solicitation for technical assistance or subject matter experts who can support the JRI approach in states and communities. This solicitation has two categories that you can see here and that Heather will talk about in more detail shortly. The second solicitation is for states interested in using the Justice Reinvestment project--process, excuse me, to undertake projects in four specific topic areas. There’s a fifth category here in orange that is for training and technical assistance to support these and existing projects. As a reminder, there have been changes in the--in the application process at OJP this year. On this slide, you will see the link to the first solicitation available here. There are two application deadlines that you need to be cognizant of, the first is the Grants.gov deadline and the second is the JustGrants deadline. And in this slide, you will see the same information for the second solicitation. I will now take it to Heather who’s going to talk about the first solicitation.

HEATHER TUBMAN-CARBONE: Thank you, Rachel. So, the first solicitation as you should see in your screen is for the State-Level Training and Technical Assistance Program. This is BJA’s longest standing JRI effort. Under this program, BJA is seeking national training and technical assistance providers and subject experts to help states use the JRI approach, which as you saw is data-driven problem analysis and evidence-based solutions to identify and respond to crime and other public safety challenges. The goal of this program is to facilitate states’ use of the data-driven Justice Reinvestment process to examine and improve policies, practices, and outcomes across the criminal justice system. Additionally, this program seeks to assess the outcomes of those efforts and build states’ capacity to continue monitoring, assessing, and improving them. To those ends, these are the objectives of the program. In each state where training and technical assistance is engaged, identify the drivers of criminal justice resource consumption; understanding those, identify ways to improve capacity to prevent and respond to crime, including reducing the risk of recidivism among people involved in the justice system; and then implement needed policy and practice changes and improve public safety through a reallocation of resources in high-performing crime and recidivism reduction effort. There are two categories, as we said, in this solicitation. The first category is training and technical assistance. We are seeking two providers with the requisite experience and abilities to provide intensive TA to states using the JRI process. We anticipate making up to $8.8 million total over the two awards for a period of 36 months. Eligible applicants are national scope private and nonprofit organizations, colleges, and universities. Successful applicants will propose staff with demonstrated experience to conduct complex data analysis, understand and address regional and state-specific criminal justice problems, and present those complex matters and related recommendations to diverse stakeholders and high-level state officials. One thing I want to be sure to clarify is that you’ll see here, we’ve got two awards up to $8.8 million total. You’ll also see in the solicitation, we specified that $2 million or $500,000 per state of four states to be served under the solicitation should be passed through as subawards to seed implementation efforts in those states. Putting all of that together, what we envision is awarding two TA providers with funds to serve a total of four states. When you submit an application for this program, you may apply to serve any number of one to four states. But what you should keep in mind is that we know that at BJA, we need more than one technical assistance provider and that in order to keep this program running, because of the level of intensity that it requires, this program is most successful having two providers doing equal lift. And so while we do not specify an even split of two states, each two TA providers, we will wait to see how the applications come in, but that has been a vision in the past. It may be the way that this award is distributed in the future, but it is intentionally not specified. I know we received a couple of questions seeking clarification. Part of what we are trying to do, frankly, is to respect that this is a resource-intensive, high-cost project and we want to see honest budget detail worksheets come in the door. So, if you have any questions, you’ll see at the end we’ve got a whole list of [INDISTINCT] you can reach out to, happy to take those questions, but I hope this provides some amount of clarity. So, talking a bit more about Category 1 again, the purpose is to help states use that JRI process to prevent and respond to crime and recidivism. While states experience many similar criminal justice system challenges, they may vary significantly in the manifestation of those issues as circumstances, resources, and laws vary across their jurisdiction. So, this is the JRI process that we pointed to earlier with one addition, on the far left side with the red circle around it, you see Ripening. It is the JRI TA provider’s responsibility to identify interested states and assess their readiness for a JRI engagement. There’s not a companion solicitation category for states to receive this particular type of assistance. This ripening process, as we call it, is the vehicle. States may reach out to BJA or another JRI partner to kick it off, then BJA will evaluate the problem statement and the assessment completed by any TA provider before accepting a state into the JRI. At the state level, JRI is a partnership of leaders from all three branches of government who commit to sharing their criminal justice data to identify, adopt, and implement proven innovative and comprehensive approaches. As such, a successful applicant will demonstrate the ability to work on all of those fronts. These next two slides are intended to give you a sense of what a TA engagement looks like. Since 2007 and through a range of individualized policy and practice changes, states have fundamentally changed the way they conduct criminal justice business, including making prison space--excuse me, prioritizing prison space for serious violent offenders and investing in strategies that have the greatest impact on reducing crime and recidivism. In this category, the TTA provider and state they work with are responsible to examine the entirety of the criminal justice system in case processing therein, examining operations, decision points, and effectiveness. They make changes to relieve pressure points and so that resources can be redirected toward serious violent and chronic offenders. This also means addressing policies, operations, and budgets. It additionally means ensuring a fair, efficient, and effective system to examine whether and how policies and practices may or may not disproportionately impact communities based on geography, race, ethnicity, and gender. The TA provider additionally needs to engage a wide range of state and local stakeholders in order to achieve those goals and objectives. There are multiple reasons for this. First, to obtain the data analysis, then to gain context for the data, and ultimately, to provide results of the analysis back to the community to create a shared understanding of it in order to build consensus around the next step. The list you see on the slide now is just a snapshot of all the groups that the TA provider will be expected to engage. There are distinct deliverables for each phase of a JRI engagement. In phase one, TTA will conduct intensive and objective agency-spanning data analyses that states could not otherwise procure on their own. They will put into context the data by taking comprehensive looks at state systems, engaging everyone from law enforcement to parole officers. Then provide the results of the data analysis back to the state and to BJA. And as I mentioned before, you’ll create a shared understanding of priority issue areas by making crime, corrections, recidivism, and other relevant data analyzed through JRI available to criminal justice partners. The next deliverable will be to build the collaboration necessary to make changes to statewide policy and practice based on the data while taking into account all aspects of the criminal justice system, including local perspective. The last step in phase one is to craft innovative and research-based solutions to improve public safety, including contemplating policies that are working well in other states to cut crime, recidivism, and cost. In the second phase of assisting each state, if states request it, TTA will develop detailed implementation plans to help states put into place the adopted policy and practice changes resulting from phase one. TA will improve collaboration between behavioral health and criminal justice agencies and other stakeholders. Ensure that victim needs and community safety are addressed in policies that aim to increase public safely while holding people accountable. In every state, if requested, TA providers will administer subaward funds up to $500,000 as seed funding to support implementation. And in every state, TA providers will monitor state’s performance and outcome and provide those data to the state and to BJA. This solicitation also has a second category for policy assessment. For this category, BJA seeks to make one award for up to $600,000 for a period of 36 months. Again, the eligible applicants are national scope private and nonprofit organizations, colleges, and universities with relevant experience--excuse me, with relevant expertise. The purpose of this category is to provide program assessment and some overall coordination for the initiative. The deliverables for Category 2 are coordination assistance to BJA, including tracking engagement and providing logistical and substantive support for a steering committee composed of project partners, such as to maintain up-to-date initiative-wide statistics and presentations showing the progress of JRI. This provider will also deliver a framework to assess state-level JRI as a whole and state-level or topical activities therein. We’re additionally looking for approximately four state or topical assessments with clear implications for the program and for the field at large. Lastly, this provider will be responsible for dissemination of the assessment results through formats and venues accessible to the field to learn from states’ efforts and be able to impact those issues. And now lastly, I just want to flag a few things to keep in mind as you develop your application for the state-level TTA solicitation. When BJA reviews your application, different weight is given to each section of the narrative and supporting materials. Please make certain to demonstrate understanding of the problem JRI seeks to solve, the JRI process, and the role of TTA or assessment in your application. There are a few things to be covered in the narrative that vary by category, so pay extra attention to those category designations. For example, in Category 1, you must have experience managing pass-through funding and in Category 2 of the assessor, you must have experience assessing national and state-level criminal justice projects. The last thing I’ll point to as you’ll see on the top right of this slide, there’s a red circle around capabilities and competencies. We need to see a demonstration of experience and of success in all of the objectives and deliverables stated in the solicitation in order to award points in this category. So, please be sure to review the attachments and the specifics noted in the solicitation and to reach out with any questions. And now I’ll hand off to Rachel to talk about the second solicitation.

RACHEL BRUSHETT: Thanks so much, Heather. Appreciate that. And as a reminder, everyone, please be sure to add any questions you might have to the Q&A box, so we can answer those at the end of the presentation. As Heather mentioned, the second solicitation I’m going to talk about today is called JRI Reducing Violent Crime by Improving Justice System Performance. This solicitation is a vehicle for criminal justice agencies and systems to improve business management and operations processes in order to address complex factors that drive crime and use the criminal justice system’s resources. The clearest way to think about this solicitation is that JRI in this context can be used to do two general types of things. First is to develop, implement, or test innovative and research-based responses to high-cost drivers of crime and other public safety challenges, including things related to law enforcement, prosecution, sentencing, courts, whatever it might be. The second way to think of it is finding a way to address chronic or emerging issues in your justice system. By collaboratively identifying the root causes, implications, and solutions of these types of problems, criminal justice agencies can better prioritize their resources and improve the management of offenders returning to or residing in the community who are most likely to commit new offenses. Through this solicitation, BJA seeks applicants in a total of five categories. Categories 1 through 4 are topical and as I mentioned before, Category 5 is the training and technical assistance support. The first category is focused on improving court processing and efficient docket management. The second category is focused on improving and implementing pretrial systems. The third is focused on innovations in information sharing to coordinate crime reduction. And the fourth is innovative approaches to improving the efficacy of state justice systems. BJA anticipates making approximately six awards of up to $1,000,000 each. Awards will be 36 months long and are anticipated to begin in October of 2021. Eligible applicants for Categories 1 through 4 include state governments and just a note that subawards and partners are allowed on those applications. And Category 5, eligible applicants include nonprofits and institutions of higher education. For all the project categories, BJA is seeking applicants who understand the JRI process and are proposing to use it to address either persistent or emerging problems. Applicants should review their entire criminal justice system from events to reentry to identify opportunities for improvement. So, I am going to walk quickly through all of the individual categories that you will see in the solicitation. So, the first category I’m going to talk about is improving court processing and efficient docket management. For this category, we’re--BJA is seeking applicants who will focus on identifying and addressing the challenges that prevent efficient, and timely, and effective court case--court case, excuse me, processing. This is a particularly timely issue in light in the backlogs that we’re seeing across the country following for the closure of courts for COVID-19. Applicants should review their court system data, policies, and procedures to identify opportunities to improve their docket management and ways to reduce unnecessary costs and delays that negatively impact both justice system processing and public safety. For example, we have seen a lot of applications across these categories and these are just some ideas, not limited to, of things you may want to explore. So, for example, you may look at building a collaborative, data-driven strategy for addressing the court system backlogs due to COVID-19 or developing a comprehensive and integrated system that’s going to streamline that court processing in order to develop options for diversion. Our second category is focused on improving and implementing pretrial systems. In this category, we’re looking for applicants to identify and address the challenges faced by jurisdictions in making pretrial release decisions that are timely, risk-informed, and fair, but also assure a defendant’s court appearance while protecting public safety. Applicants should review the entirety of their pretrial system, their data, policies, and procedures to identify opportunities for planning, implementation, and enhancement to better determine pretrial risk level, how that impacts public safety, and reduce the likelihood of failure to appear. You will see here a quick example of something you may consider doing under this category. Again, it will be something like taking and undertaking a comprehensive data-driven assessment of the state-level pretrial system and exploring the viability of implementing various tools to streamline decision-making. Next, we have Category 3, which is innovations and information sharing to coordinate crime reduction. In this category, we’re really focused on data-sharing and ways--and innovative ways that we can implement new tools to enhance data-sharing across the entirety of the criminal justice system. We all know that the lack of data and the lack of information-sharing across the system creates a number of expensive and extensive problems across the system. So, we’re looking for projects innovative and creative that will seek to break down information-sharing silos and challenge current practices that may be impeding a community’s crime reduction strategy. Examples of things you may want to consider are as follows: developing a comprehensive and integrated datasharing and notification system about violent offenders, so that they can be tracked as they’re moving throughout the system. Or build data analysis capacity and improve partner ability to produce cross-system analysis, that type of analysis Heather was talking about across the entire system, so you can better understand the contributions of pretrial, probation, parole, reentry, and other services on crime trends. Our last topical category here is going to be Category 4, innovative approaches to improve the efficacy of state justice systems. I think it’s best to think of this category--all right. I’m stuck on a scroll here, unable to move to the next slide. There we go. This category, I think it’s best to think of as the catch-all, so if your idea doesn’t neatly fit under one of the three categories before, this is going to be your best bet for a category to apply under. Here, we’re looking for any sort of idea--innovative ideas and approaches for addressing either persistent or emerging crime problems and public safety issues, or you may also propose a project that focuses on removing the impediments that you might have in place to addressing those crime problems. Again, we encourage applicants to look at the entirety of the criminal justice system from events to reentry in order to identify innovative opportunities for improvement. We have a couple of examples here that you may want to consider to maybe improving data collection and training about issues like victimization, and trauma, implementing a datadriven intervention in the area of behavioral health, reviewing existing violent crime and opiate reduction strategies to determine their effectiveness and make improvements, or it might be developing the analytic capacity to identify and respond to other criminal justice system-related problem. And just a reminder again, these are examples that you may want to consider, they’re not at all considered to be restrictive. We encourage you to think outside of the box and propose ideas under each of these four categories. In terms of deliverables for Categories 1 through 4, there is one deliverable that is going to be a final report summarizing the changes made and the preliminary outcomes. It’s also worth noting all of the grantees under this award category, Categories 1 through 4, will receive training and technical assistance support from a provider in implementing their project and in completing their final report, and that is going to be technical assistance that comes free of charge. One quick note again, we’re talking about states as the primary applicant here for these Categories 1 through 4. And there is priority consideration available under those categories. The Department of Justice is committed to advancing work that promotes civil rights, increases access to justice, supports crime victims, protects the public from crimes and evolving threats, and builds trust between law enforcement and communities. So, these are going to be the areas under which you can seek priority. To receive priority consideration for advancing one or more of the Department’s priorities, the applicant must provide a sufficient narrative explanation as an attachment that specifies how the projects will advance the promotion of civil rights, access to justice, support to crime victims, etc. In addition, OJP will be giving priority consideration if applicable to applicants who demonstrate that individuals who are intended to benefit from the requested grant reside in a high-poverty area or a persistent-poverty county. Please see the solicitation for more information. The final category I’m going to talk about under this solicitation is Category 5, and that’s going to be training and technical assistance support for site-based projects. Again, this is a category that is designed to provide support to grantees under Categories 1 through 4. You will be supporting site-based grantees and using the JRI process to address crime problems and implement their proposed projects. There are a wider range of deliverables of course under this category. We are expecting a provider who will be able to provide education as well as proactive and comprehensive support. You’ll be expected to assign a coach to each site who will manage, monitor, and report on the support needs of that individual site; identify and maintain a list of consultants whose expertise and experience can best meet grantee needs; plan for and host distancelearning sessions for sites and the field at large; as well as develop materials to document grantee experiences and the results of the assistance. As Heather talked about, there are some unique considerations for the application. And I will start with Categories 1 through 4. Again, as Heather said, the weighting is different across each of the different categories. So, for Categories 1 through 4, please be attendant to the chart here. The one plug I will make, as Heather also made, is your application should absolutely include a description of how you are going to apply the JRI process as described earlier in this presentation to your specific problem. Without that connection, we’re going to have a hard time being able to give full credit points for that description of the issue category. Likewise in Category 5, please be attendant to the weighting there, as Heather also flagged, that capabilities and competencies category in order to get full credit, you should be providing full information on the experience of the applicant as well as of the key personnel. There’s some additional information that may be helpful for you all as you’re moving through your application. Each individual program solicitation outlines all of the elements in a section called Application Submission Information. There’s a checklist at the end of the solicitation that we recommend you all use in order to make sure you have included all of the required items. Additionally on this slide, something to be attendant to is that there is a new executive order out on Safe Policing for Safe Communities. And in order to advance that executive order, the Attorney General determined that all state, local, and university or college law enforcement agencies must be certified by an approved independent credentialing body or have started the certification process in order to be eligible for fiscal year 2021 DOJ discretionary grant funding, so that applies to this award. The certification requirement also applies to proposed subawardees. To become certified, the law enforcement agency must meet two mandatory conditions. First, the agency’s use-of-force policies must adhere to all applicable federal, state, and local laws. And second, the agency’s use-of-force policies must prohibit chokeholds except in situations where use of deadly force is allowed by law. For detailed information on the new certification requirement, please visit the link provided in the chat box as well as on the slide. As I alluded to at the beginning of the presentation, OJP has transferred from the GMS system to the new JustGrants system. It’s a new system in place. There have been a little bit of growing pains, but that is the system that we will be using moving forward. JustGrants offers a streamlined end-to-end process, enabling applicants and grantees to move seamlessly through the full grants management cycle. It also gives applicants and award recipients new ways to manage their own entity information and that of the users in the system. In addition to having a new system in place, there is a new dual deadline structure. Applicants--applications must be submitted in a new two-step process, each of which has its own deadline. So, the first is going to be that Grants.gov deadline as step one. You’re going to submit your SF-424 and your SF-LLL through Grants.gov. And then second, you’re going to come into JustGrants to submit your full application package. Please review your solicitation carefully for further guidance. There are also a number of resources that are available on the OJP website for those of you who are--have questions and concerns. There’s a couple of other unique features to remember. Please be sure to identify all the forms that need to be submitted with your application. There are unique ways to do that in JustGrants, so please do follow those steps. In JustGrants, you will also be expected to complete a web-based budget form, which is a little different from previous years. So again, please be attendant to that. You will complete your entire application certifying information and submit it again into the JustGrants system. We know there have been a lot of questions, so please do reach out to the JustGrants support team. On the website, you’ll find a number of tutorials, webinars, etc., support materials to help you in that process. You can also reach out directly to the JustGrants help desk, which we will provide that link for you as well. I am going to kick it back to Heather to wrap up and move us into the Q&A.

HEATHER TUBMAN-CARBONE: Thank you, Rachel. So, as you heard from Rachel, there are a number of additional resources, you should see those links up on your screen now. And Tammy has graciously placed them in the chat for you as well. Also, if you go to any of the major search engines and type in the keywords that you see in gray, these should pop up. Some additional, additional resources that we have available to you are part of what we call our BJA Grant Application Education Series. And particularly, if you are not entirely familiar with writing grant applications, these might be pretty helpful to understand how you work through, not only the--not only the actual--the systems online, but also just what should be included, for example, in a problem statement or in capabilities and competencies. Additionally, all of the transcripts and PDFs of the presentations in the series of webinars are currently available on our website at the link on your screen. Some very, very important contact information for you right now. So, as you heard from Rachel, this is our first year with dual deadlines and the first and to be honest, hopefully, our only year where you will have to submit in two different systems. If you have any questions, if the question is about submitting in Grants.gov, please contact Grants.gov. That’s the first item you see up on the screen. If the question is about submitting a full application in JustGrants, please contact JustGrants. If the question is about the content of the application, for example, a substantive question, what, you know, about something in the problem statement or a budget question, in that case, you should be contacting NCJRS or the OJP Response Center and that is the third item on your screen. So, now, you’ll--we’ll--we’re going to move into Q&A in a moment. Now, you can see my direct contact information. We want you to have our contact information, but we do ask that if you have questions specific to the solicitation that you use one of those three contact points that we just shared, I’ll go back to them in a moment, because in fairness to the entire field, what we want to do is to catalogue all questions that come in and all responses that we provide, so that if a question coming in alerts us to the fact that there is novel information we did not previously provide, we will need to revise the solicitation or add an addendum to make something available to everyone to ensure a level playing field. So again, this is our direct contact information or my direct contact information, please feel free to reach out. But if it is a question specific to one of these systems or to the solicitation, please use one of the contacts shown on the screen at this time. At this point, we will move into the Q&A portion of our webinar. So, if--I believe folks have been entering some questions in the Q&A box. If you haven’t, but you have questions, please head there now and I’m going turn things back to Daryl to moderate our Q&A.

DARYL FOX: Thanks, Heather. Yeah. Once again, the Q&A box can be located at the bottom right side of your screen under the three dots. Just select Q&A and then enter it there. I’ll be glad to address anything. First one coming in is, “Could you speak to how a small organization or entity might vet itself to be considered a--by a TTA entity under project one?”

HEATHER TUBMAN-CARBONE: Sure. So I think there’s--gosh, this is where it’s tough that we can’t all talk to each other. So, I think there’s two ways to interpret that question and if you’ll bear with me, everyone, I’m going to answer both. So, the first way to interpret that question is how a small organization or entity might vet itself to be considered by a TA entity under the state level TA project. Me, I hear that could either be how might you be competitive as a TA provider or how might you be competitive as a subawardee to a TA provider? I think this is a program that requires incredibly intensive technical assistance and it requires expertise on a range of from data analysis to implementation, sustainability, and it requires also the expertise in everything from behavioral health to corrections to institutional management. And so, I think the best thing to do is if you go to--I apologize, I don’t have--you know what, I’m going to pull the link for it and drop it in the chat. We recently published on our website--I’m dropping it in the chat right now. We recently published a document from our partners that we call the JRI Guide for States. And what you can see in this document is that it walks through in greater detail the JRI process. And I think what this will help do is to show where we say like to have the expertise. What do we mean by that? And I--what I would recommend-- sorry, what I’d recommend is to look through that document and try to assess whether or not your organization has those capabilities. And if you believe you do and if you have the staff and capacity to deliver that type of a system, then certainly you should apply for the--for the award. If however, you think you fit into just certain pieces of that, then I think it would make sense to find others in the field who perhaps fit the bigger picture and figure out how you could partner and submit an application together. I hope that answered the question. If it did not, please don’t hesitate to go back to the Q&A and clarify. I’m happy to revisit.

DARYL FOX: Thanks for that, Heather. Next question coming in, “Is there an inherent emphasis on reducing recidivism of violent offenders specifically?”

HEATHER TUBMAN-CARBONE: So, it’s also…

RACHEL BRUSHETT: I think I could jump in on that one.

HEATHER TUBMAN-CARBONE: [INDISTINCT]

RACHEL BRUSHETT: Sorry, Heather. I will let you respond for the state-based TA. So, the site-based there is not. That has been a focus in the past and that’s certainly a conversation that we continue to see being had, but there is not a requirement or a preference for focus on violent crime.

DARYL FOX: “As a nonprofit organization, is there guidance on setting up an indirect cost rate for the submission?”

HEATHER TUBMAN-CARBONE: There is a process. We cannot speak to that on this webinar, but they can look at--if they go to the website. It’s technical and it lives outside of us. So, I would search the DOJ or the OJP Grants Financial Guide and there are certainly folks you can reach out to to set that up. I would do it as soon as possible if you’re thinking of applying.

DARYL FOX: “Is there a resource to better understand the procurement and contracting requirements that this grant will have if awarded?

HEATHER TUBMAN-CARBONE: Absolutely, the OJP Grants Financial Guide.

DARYL FOX: “There’s currently a discrepancy between the solicitation number and the site-based app and what populates in the Grants.gov application automatically.” Technical support is aware and working to the fix. So, to the person who submitted this question, thank you for that. Have you heard anything, Rachel or Heather, upon that-- regarding that?

RACHEL BRUSHETT: No, that’s new to me. Thank you for flagging that and we will certainly see if we can’t run that down on our end. We’ll absolutely. Thanks for flagging.

DARYL FOX: And Heather, going back to that first question you answered. That did answer the question submitted. So, she thanks you for that.

HEATHER TUBMAN-CARBONE: Great.

DARYL FOX: And that’s really that--all that’s in the queue at this point. Once again, if you do have a question, feel free to enter it in the Q&A, the panelists would be glad to answer it. Just going back to specific information on this slide, if you do have questions regarding Grants.gov, JustGrants, or anything related programmatically, technical assistance with the solicitation itself, the OJP Response Center, great resources either by phone or email and their websites as well. Also, once again, the slides, the PowerPoint, transcript and recording from today’s webinar will be posted to the BJA website within about 5 to 10 business days. So, if you do need to go back and reference anything stated here today, please be on the lookout for that. That seems to be in it in the queue at this point. Rachel and Heather, do you want to hang on for just a little moment or…

HEATHER TUBMAN-CARBONE: I think if there’s nothing else, we’re good to go, but I strongly encourage folks to reach out using all three of those contacts on the screen. I would say reach out early and often in the application process if you have any concerns.

DARYL FOX: Wonderful. So, on behalf of the Bureau of Justice Assistance and our panelists, we want to thank you for joining today’s webinar. This will end today’s presentation.