**Coordinating Council Interagency Work**

The Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (Council), an independent body within the executive branch of the federal government, is one of the primary mechanisms within the federal government to coordinate juvenile delinquency prevention programs. The Council is composed of representatives of the statutory member agencies—the U.S. Departments of Justice (DOJ), Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Labor (DOL), Education (ED), and Health and Human Services (HHS), the Executive Office for National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The Council works to coordinate relevant federal work and to support state and local juvenile justice programs.

The Council supports collaboration across agencies in a variety of ways including interagency agreements, in-kind contributions of member agency staff time and resources to support initiatives (through temporary reassignment of staff and/or contractors and participation on long-standing and ad hoc interagency working groups and partnerships), and coordinated and jointly funded initiatives. Recent activities and initiatives undertaken or supported by the Council include:

· Support of the DOL-led Shared Youth Vision. 

· Establishment of the Federal Mentoring Council. 

· Interagency Agreement between DOJ’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) and HHS’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)/Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT).

· Development of Geographic Information (GIS) strategic planning and program tools.

· Funding of and participation in the Federal Partnership Project.

· Support for federal coordination in the Gulf Coast Region. 

**Shared Youth Vision**

Led by DOL, a number of federal agencies including DOJ, ED, HUD, HHS, U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), CNCS, and U.S. Social Security Administration are partnering to improve efforts to serve the nation’s neediest youth. The mission of the Shared Youth Vision Partnership is to serve as a catalyst at the national, state, and local levels to strengthen coordination, communication, and collaboration among youth-serving agencies working to help at-risk youth make successful and healthy transitions to adult roles and responsibilities. Beginning in 2004, the federal partners hosted a series of regional youth forums and a technical assistance conference focusing on collaboration strategies to better serve youth. In 2007, 16 pilot sites were selected to demonstrate the types of partnerships and integration strategies that should be used to target disadvantaged youth. Shared Youth Vision has developed the following tools to enhance collaboration and information dissemination:

· A collaborative Internet-based workspace provides information to state initiative partners and enhances cross-state communication.

· A federal interagency “Solutions Desk” provides state teams a single point of access to the federal information resources available to help states implement Shared Youth Vision activities. 

· A Crosswalk of Key Federal Program Definitions and Program Policies addresses policy issues that present obstacles to cross-agency collaboration.

· A Federal Youth Funding Matrix provides states with information on funding available to serve youth in their state from each federal agency.

· A Federal/State Benchmark Tool provides states with broad principles to help them gauge the effectiveness of their collaborative efforts. 

For more information on Shared Youth Vision, visit http://www.doleta.gov/ryf/.

**Federal Mentoring Council**

With support from the Coordinating Council, at the impetus of CNCS, and under the joint leadership of CNCS and HHS, the interagency Federal Mentoring Council (FMC) was established in 2006 to coordinate federal mentoring work and develop new federal initiatives to increase the number of mentor-mentee pairs in the nation, particularly those targeting disadvantaged youth. The FMC identified gaps in mentoring services, assessed current knowledge about what works and how to identify and disseminate best practices in the mentoring field, and developed the following common description of mentoring for federal agencies:

Mentoring is a structured, sustained relationship between an older, more experienced person and a young person that is designed to improve one or more of the following: family and peer relationships; health and health behaviors; self-esteem and well-being; and motivation, attitude, and achievement related to education and/or to work.

The FMC drafted and adopted an Executive Order (EO) on Mentoring requiring all departments/agencies to increase the number of federally funded programs that infuse youth mentoring into grant competitions and to increase the number of federal employees who mentor. The objectives of the EO on Mentoring were subsumed within President Bush’s February 7, 2008, Executive Order: Improving the Coordination and Effectiveness of Youth Programs. The EO states that a function of the new Interagency Working Group on Youth Programs is to “identify and promote initiatives and activities that merit strong interagency collaboration because of their potential to offer cost-effective solutions to achieve better results for at-risk youth, including volunteer service in concert with the USA Freedom Corps and mentoring in concert with the Federal Mentoring Council.”  

**Interagency Agreement between SAMHSA/CSAT and OJJDP**

OJJDP and SAMHSA/CSAT have entered into an interagency agreement to support joint development by federal, state, and local authorities of guidelines for working with youth offenders in the areas of screening, assessment, referral, and treatment. The goal of this partnership is to better coordinate investment of federal, state, and local efforts to build resiliency and facilitate recovery among youth at risk or suffering from substance abuse or mental health disorders. Major activities under this agreement include:

· **OJJDP-SAMHSA Partnership Meetings:** A series of meetings with key OJJDP and SAMHSA/CSAT staff as well as representatives from other relevant organizations such as the National Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators and the National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Administrators. The purpose of the meetings is to explore areas of common interest, elicit input from partner agencies, and develop the groundwork for future collaboration. The initial meeting, which was held on November 5, 2007, has led to bimonthly teleconferences and ad hoc technical assistance around issues affecting youth and youth-serving agencies at the federal, state, and local levels. These discussions are expected to inform the next round of grant announcements from CSAT that target youth in the juvenile justice system.

· **State of the State Summits:** A series of 1-day meetings to bring practitioners in the fields of juvenile justice, substance abuse prevention/treatment, and prevention/treatment of mental health disorders together with federal staff, selected national associations and consumer groups, and researchers. An outgrowth of the first of these summits (December 2006) is a Memorandum of Understanding between OJJDP, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), and SAMHSA/CSAT to fund a new model of juvenile drug courts. In September 2007, three communities were awarded 4-year grants. RWJF is providing training and technical assistance for implementation of the “Reclaiming Futures” model in the juvenile court system, SAMHSA/CSAT is funding and providing technical assistance for substance abuse treatment for youth, and OJJDP is administering the grants and overseeing the operation of the juvenile drug courts. It is expected that in 2008 another joint solicitation will be developed by OJJDP with input and funding support from CSAT. 

· **Tribal Planning Forum on Juvenile Justice and Substance Abuse/Mental Health:**SAMHSA is using information from the Tribal Planning Forum on Juvenile Justice, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Issues: Improving the Delivery of Services to Tribal Youth, held in conjunction with the 2006 National Training Conference for Criminal Justice and Community Leaders (November 1 – 3). The report from this meeting is informing Native American Juvenile Justice Policy Academies conducted by SAMHSA. SAMHSA hosted the first Policy Academy on Co-occurring Substance Use and Mental Disorders for Native Communities on September 11–13, 2007, which included a track focusing on tribal children involved in the Wellness Court System. Additionally, input from this meeting has been used in the development of grant announcements for tribal communities and in ongoing work in the behavioral health field between SAMHSA and the Indian Health Service.

**GIS Planning and Program Tools**

Council agencies and other partners have worked over the past 4 years to develop two Geographic Information System (GIS) tools with the capacity to display crime problems, community and governmental assets including evidence-based programs, and socioeconomic factors to help communities, policymakers, and program administrators in the prevention and control of crime and delinquency. These tools drew upon developmental work undertaken by OJJDP to create its model programs database and gang prevention and reduction strategic planning tool and were enhanced and populated by a cross-agency working team led by SAMHSA. 

1. The **Helping America’s Youth Community Guide** integrates a model programs database with resource mapping and community data into a Web-based planning tool for communities. Visit http://www.helpingamericasyouth.gov/guide.cfm for additional information. (It is anticipated that by the end of the third quarter 2008, this Guide will be moved to another web site, as yet to be determined.)

2. OJJDP’s **Socioeconomic Mapping and Resource Topography Tool (SMART)** is a Web-based mapping application that pinpoints local geographic areas of crime and delinquency and nearby governmental and community resources to prevent and control it. This tool was developed to help federal, state, and local decisionmakers target areas of greatest need and allocate resources accordingly. Along with maps, SMART creates tables and graphs to chart a wide array of socioeconomic data, such as population, crime, housing, health, and mortality. Visit http://smart.gismapping.info/smart/About.aspx to access the SMART system.

**Federal Partnership Project**

Under the Federal Partnership Project, the Council is now undertaking three sets of activities to (1) increase knowledge about federal collaboration and comprehensive community initiatives (CCIs) designed to improve the well-being of children, youth, family, and community; and (2) enhance the federal practice of coordinated assistance with the aim of enhancing the ability of states and local jurisdictions to best access and use resources to improve the well-being of children, youth, and families. The three activities are:

1. **Comprehensive Community Initiatives and Technical Assistance Inventory,**a set of practice guidelines and an inventory of selected CCIs and associated technical assistance (TA) that documents effects on local systems and on youth and families and that is of value to state and federal policymakers, practitioners, and funders of CCIs. The goals of  this efforts are:

· To identify effective CCIs and determine what TA is most useful at what stages. 

· To guide future federal implementation and support of CCIs and TA.

· To guide development of performance measures and evaluation designs for CCIs.  

2. **Federal Collaboration Project,** a set of practice guidelines for the purpose of professionalizing the practice of federal collaboration. The guidelines, which will include principles, practices, measures, and protocols for coordinated federal assistance in support of state and local youth development and delinquency prevention efforts, will be developed by examining relevant successful and less successful cross-agency and joint federal initiatives, past and current, and by identifying core elements of effective federal collaboration practice.

3. **Delinquency Development Statements (DDS),**updated statements for key federal agencies describing the extent to which reporting federal agencies conform with and further federal juvenile delinquency prevention and treatment goals and policies and related activities and programs. This information will be used in joint planning. Prior to its most recent reauthorization, the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act required every federal agency that administers a juvenile justice program to submit a DDS annually to the Coordinating Council and to the Administrator of OJJDP.  

**Federal Coordination in the Gulf Coast Region**

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Council and individual member agencies directed attention to coordination of federal resources for at-risk youth in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Activities included:

· The Council heard presentations at its March 2007 meeting by David Bell, Chief Judge, Orleans Parish Juvenile Court, and Monique Preau, Education Support Services Director, Recovery School District, Louisiana Department of Education, on the need for justice, health, and education programs and services.

· OJJDP conducted an assessment of the needs of the juvenile court and youth-serving agencies.

· CNCS and DOL deployed assets on an emergency basis to assist New Orleans area agencies and youth-serving programs. The Council funded the development of a database of federal resources and programs available in the Gulf Coast region to serve at-risk youth. Through this Council effort, local stakeholders have a better understanding of where federal resources are and how to access them. 

· Building upon its Shared Youth Vision platform, DOL awarded a $15 million National Emergency Grant (NEG) focusing on out-of-school youth in the New Orleans area. The grant helped catalyze further federal collaboration in the region. In January 2008, DOL sponsored the “New Orleans Region Mixer” to engage all the Shared Youth Vision federal partners along with their state and local counterparts. The meeting focused on launching the NEG activities, asset mapping, and strengthening communication between federal, state, and local agencies and across systems. 

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