The Coalition for Justice-Engaged Students Colorado (C-JESCO), a collaboration focused on reducing alcohol, nicotine, and marijuana use among justice-engaged and adjudicated students in Denver, CO. - The Coalition for Justice Engaged Students Colorado (C-JESCO) was created to support and improve the behavioral health and educational outcomes for justice-engaged and adjudicated (JEA) young people as well as those at risk of justice involvement. Colorado nonprofit Generation Schools Network (GSN) currently facilitates this coalition focused on improving behavioral health and reducing substance use among JEA young people. For this project, C-JESCO will be focused on reducing alcohol, nicotine, and marijuana use among justice-engaged and adjudicated students in Denver, CO. This project will use the Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF) to identify and select comprehensive, data-driven substance abuse prevention strategies to achieve goals and objectives. The SPF will guide all coalition activities, including assessing the community, building capacity, program planning, implementation, and evaluation of strategies. Coalition activities will fall within two focus areas aligned with the two DFC goal areas: 1) Multi-agency coordination/collaboration to improve community mobilization and 2) Strategies for community-level change to prevent and reduce substance use among JEA young people. All work both internal to the coalition and external in the community will be conducted using a positive youth development (PYD) approach and will be community-drive. JES-CO will achieve all outcomes identified in the Program Logic Model. Specifically, the project objectives are to reduce use of alcohol, nicotine, and marijuana among JEA students in Denver. Evaluation activities will be conducted for all interventions; data collection will rely on strong relationships with partners. GSN and C-JESCO will participate in the national cross-site evaluation. GSN will serve as the fiscal agent for C-JESCO. GSN has the financial and administrative capacity to manage a large federal grants, and staff bring decades of collective experience in education, coalition building, substance use prevention, and supporting JEA students.
