The Center for Trauma Recovery and Juvenile Justice (CTRJJ) brings together juvenile justice (JJ) and mental health services experts with lived and professional experience to increase the capacity nationally to deliver culturally responsive evidence-based trauma treatment (EBTT) and trauma informed (TI) services to JJ-involved youth (JJIY) and youth at risk (JJAR), families, and JJ staff, and to increase traumatized JJIY/JJAR access nationally to TI services and EBTTs..
Since 2012, CTRJJ partnered with NCCTS to form an NCTSN JJ Coordinating Committee and has created an array of trainings, educational products and presentations, and programmatic/ policy consultation for, and in collaboration with, leading national JJ advocacy organizations, professional societies, justice-related federal agencies and >75 municipal or regional juvenile justice systems in 25 states/territories. CTRJJ faculty have done >2,000 presentation/trainings for to more than 40,000 multidisciplinary providers, JJ personnel, attorneys, and judges, and school, child welfare, law enforcement, homelessness, family preservation, violence prevention, and health care services providers who serve >75,000 JJIY/JJAR, in collaboration with >20 Category II and >30 Category III NCTSN Centers/Affiliates, while producing >25 peer review publications and >50 educational products such as Working Together in the Pandemic for Trauma Informed Juvenile Justice and Trauma-Informed Services for Unaccompanied Minors.
Over the five-year funding period, CTRJJ will provide training and technical assistance to more than 2500 youth/family serving programs and 10,000 professional/peer service providers to enable them to adapt, deliver, and evaluate EBTTs validated for JJIY/JJAR (TARGET and TGCTA) and a unique TI services curriculum for front-line staff (Think Trauma) and effectively serve > 50,000 traumatized JJIY/JJAR and their families. CTRJJ will continue partnering with the NCTSN National Center to lead and coordinate NCTSN JJ initiatives, and with Category II and III Centers to produce 500 public and professional TIJJ training and education products and presentations. CTRJJ will add faculty with unique expertise on racial/ethnic, identity-related, and historical trauma, implementation science, and JJ systems, in order to launch 2 major initiatives: (1) a TI JJ System Enhancement Academy (SEA) designed to guide 25 multi-constituency multi-disciplinary teams anchored by NCTSN Category III Center/Affiliates in developing coordinated TI enhancements of their local JJ services to prevent and reduce JJ involvement, increase youth and staff safety and prevent re-traumatization, and, increase involvement of parents and family members as partners while also reducing the adverse effects of secondary traumatic stress on JJ personnel and providers; (2) a Core Skills Consortium (CSC) of 15 NCTSN Category II Centers, that will identify core skills for TI/EBTT training, assessment, intervention, collaborative multi- disciplinay multi-system services planning and coordination, and service system transformation. Together, the SEA and CSC will create a framework for, and serve as first steps toward, a long-term initiative to integrate and sustain TI services within and across JJ and related systems.