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The Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics recently released a report on indicators of children’s well-being and features statistics on children and families in the United States.
America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2013 is the sixteenth in an ongoing series of reports on children and family statistics. The reports look at 41 key indicators in seven domains: family and social environment, economic circumstances, health care, physical environment and safety, behavior, education, and health.
The report found interesting changes in the past two years and projected outcomes for the children’s population:

• A drop in births for unmarried women. 46 births for every 1,000 unmarried women ages 15–44 in 2011, down from 48 per 1,000 in 2010.
• A drop in the percentage of children from birth to 17 years with no usual source of healthcare, from 5 percent in 2010 to 4 percent in 2011.
• A drop in the percentage of children from birth to 17 years of age living with two married parents, from 65 percent in 2010 to 64 percent in 2011.
• A rise in the percentage of male and female 12th graders who reported binge drinking—consuming five or more alcoholic beverages in a row in the past two weeks—from 22 percent in 2011 to 24 percent in 2012.
• By 2050, about half of the American population ages under 17 is projected to be children who are Hispanic, Asian, or of two or more races.
• By 2050, the population of children under the age of 17 will make up 21 percent of the population.

Many thanks to Dennis Reilly, project director in Nassau County, NY, who takes the time to describe how Reclaiming Futures has helped teens on Long Island by promoting community organization, information sharing and evidence-based practices.

Below you'll find a selection of the latest grants, jobs, webinars and events posted to our Opportunity Board. Please share the Reclaiming Futures Opportunity Board with your colleagues in the juvenile justice, adolescent substance abuse and teen mental health areas. It's free to browse and post!
Grants

• OJJDP FY 13 National Resource Mentoring Center
  The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) supports a wide range of mentoring initiatives aimed at preventing and reducing juvenile delinquency. Under this solicitation, the successful applicant will develop the OJJDP National Mentoring Resource Center (NMRC), which will provide comprehensive mentoring resource, reference, and training materials and advance the implementation of evidence- and research-based mentoring practices.
• Youth Service Improvement (New York)
  The YSIG program is open to community-based organizations in the five boroughs of New York City that want to improve the quality of the services they offer to young people ages 8 to 25. Awards are $25,000.

Juvenile Justice Reform

• Seven Officers at Georgia RYDC Removed after “Egregious Policy Violations” (JJIE.org)
  Georgia’s Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) announced that seven employees at the DeKalb County Regional Youth Detention Center have been removed, following findings from a three-week investigation. According to Jim Shuler, an official DJJ spokesman, three of the officers, among them the facility’s night shift sergeant, resigned while the review was still being conducted.
• Locking up Juveniles may Plant Seeds of More Crime (The Chicago Tribune)
  Joe Doyle was still a grad student at the University of Chicago in the late 1990s when he went to watch the proceedings in Cook County's juvenile court. He sat there while inexperienced lawyers argued over the fate of young offenders, mostly young black men. He witnessed judges who had to instruct those inexperienced lawyers on procedure at the same time that they, the judges, had to render life-altering decisions.
• OP-ED: Breaking the Cycle of Hyper-Recidivism (JJIE.org)
  "Is reform a means to cut the budget or is cutting the budget a means to reform? It’s like which came first–the chicken or the egg? For Georgia, I think money is part of the equation, and ultimately becomes part of the outcome, but it’s definitely not the primary objective despite it’s appearance."
• Charlottesville Forum Focuses on Racial Disparities in Juvenile Justice (The Daily Progress)
  Gloria Newman remembered a son’s troubles as a teen and the message she received. “I was looking for help,” Newman said Tuesday at a Charlottesville Commission of Children and Families task force forum. “I was told, he’s not in the system, he can’t get help. There needs to be a preventative measure to get help before they get in the system.”

I was recently sent a link to The Mistakes Kids Make website. While taking the quiz, I was reminded of the difference between the negligible costs of my mistakes, from the potentially life-changing payment my black, 22 year old son might face for making the same mistakes. Though it is a difference that Stoneleigh strives to erase, it is a reality that was repeatedly mentioned at the Stoneleigh Symposium, From Risk to Resilience: What Youth Need to Thrive.
On May 8, representatives from all segments of the Philadelphia community came to discuss what it means to be resilient and how as individuals and a community, we can help youth thrive by making them so. Attendees came to hear from an adolescent pediatrician who has spent his career building on the strengths of teenagers by fostering their resilience, a young man from Boston who benefited from an ecosystem of youth development programs, one of his mentors who has spent 40 years serving youth and their families in Boston’s poorest and most violent community, the Deputy Commissioner of Philadelphia’s DHS who oversees the Division of Juvenile Justice Services and is a passionate advocate for fairness and equity in that system, and a Stoneleigh Fellow who developed and directs an alternative approach to dealing with violent crime.
Each of our speakers provided unique perspectives on what it means and what it takes to develop resilience in youth. Each of them addressed the reality that young black and brown boys and men are treated differently for the common mistakes they make in childhood and adolescence. However, all of the speakers agreed that it is never too late to transition youth from risk to resilience and that first and foremost all youth need to feel loved.
When we developed the symposium, this was not the core message I expected to hear from a scientist, a bureaucrat, or our friends from Boston. Though resilience is a basic human capacity, nascent in all children, and something that can be developed even in the most hurt children, it doesn’t just happen. In fact, for children who have faced a lifetime of social, racial and economic injustice, it demands intentional practice change that starts with caring adults.

PEW recently published a report revealing the effectiveness of the RECLAIM (Reasoned and Equitable Community and Local Alternatives to Incarceration of Minors) funding initiative in Ohio. The report found RECLAIM to be highly successful in lowering recidivism rates and saving the state millions of dollars:

RECLAIM is an initiative funding program that allows county courts to implement community based programs in order to provide alternatives to juvenile incarceration for juvenile offenders or youth at risk of offending. The increased funding for counties is based on an equation that refunds counties for the time juvenile offenders would have spent if they had been committed to the Ohio Department of Youth Services (DYS) state facility.
Like many states in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Ohio saw an increase in the incarcerated youth population. By 1992, the state reached an all-time high of 180 percent of capacity with many of the youth being first-time nonviolent offenders. The idea was that by better serving low to medium risk offenders through locally tailored community programs, admissions would decrease as well as recidivism rates.

Back in April we shared Guy, a young artist in recovery's story. Today we're featuring it again, because it's such a powerful message. In this three-minute video, Guy, a well-known graffiti artist in Snohomish County, Washington, describes his transformation as a Promising Artists in Recovery (PAIR) participant.

Through Reclaiming Futures Snohomish County, Henri Wilson and other generous adults are mentoring young artists in the county's juvenile justice system who have substance abuse issues. By engaging in calligraphy, painting and photography classes, teens are viewing life through a different lens.

Below you'll find a selection of the latest grants, jobs, webinars and events posted to our Opportunity Board. Please share the Reclaiming Futures Opportunity Board with your colleagues in the juvenile justice, adolescent substance abuse and teen mental health areas. It's free to browse and post!
Grants
 

• Grief Reach
  Grief Reach is a partnership between the National Alliance for Grieving Children and the New York Life Foundation. The goal of this partnership is to provide funds to Children's Bereavement Programs to expand the reach of their programs to include underserved youth populations, ages 18 years and younger.
• John R. Justice FY 2013 Program
  The JRJ Grant Program (also referred to as the John R. Justice Student Loan Repayment Program ("JRJSLR") provides loan repayment assistance for local, state, and federal public defenders and local and state prosecutors who commit to continued employment as public defenders and prosecutors for at least three years.
• OJJDP Announces New Funding Opportunities
  The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) has announced several fiscal year 2013 funding opportunities, including National Juvenile Justice Information Sharing Training and Technical Assistance Program. OJJDP seeks applications for its national program to deliver training, technical assistance, and implementation support for information sharing among juvenile justice, child welfare, mental health, education, and other youth-serving agencies.
• Alcohol Education Funds (Statesville, NC)
  Each year, as required by North Carolina law, the ABC Board in Statesville distributes 7% of its remaining gross receipts (after other designated distributions) for the treatment of alcoholism or substance abuse, or for research or education on alcohol or substance abuse. The exact amount of the funds to be distributed will not be determined until the annual audit is completed.

Juvenile Justice Reform

• Mentoring Program for At-Risk Youth to Begin in Scott County, Missouri (seMissourian.com)
  A new program will pair mentors with at-risk children in four area counties. Building Understanding; Developing Success, or BUDS for short, is a recently developed mentoring program funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. The program will place volunteers 21 years old or older with at-risk children and teenagers ages 9 to 17.
• Paws for a Cause (Rankinledger.com)
  Rehabilitation is two-fold at Rankin County Mississippi Juvenile Justice Center where both dogs and juveniles leave the center ready for the world. The Rankin County Sheriff Department’s Paws for a Cause is a partnership between the county’s animal shelter and juvenile justice center. It’s a way to rehabilitate both the juveniles and the dogs. Since it began about a year ago, Sergeant Ken Sullivan said pet lovers have adopted about 22 dogs from the program.
• Local Television Piece Features Innovative Baby Elmo Program for Young Fathers at an Ohio Juvenile Correctional Facility (VERA.org)
  A recent piece on ABC News Channel 5 in Cleveland, Ohio, highlighted the Baby Elmo Program for young fathers at the Cuyahoga Hills Juvenile Correctional Facility. The program, which was designed by researchers at Georgetown University, develops the relationships between incarcerated teen fathers and their babies through intensive experiential learning.