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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!
Jobs

• Youth Facility Assistant Director | New York | $55,963-$69,132 annually
• Unit Manager | Arkansas
• Deputy Legal Director/Director of Juvenile Justice Advocacy | Alabama

Webinars

• Trauma-Informed and Solution-Focused Domestic Violence Practice in Child Protective Services: Aug. 20
• The Importance of Establishing a Community in Recovery: Aug. 21

Events

• NACC 36th National Child Welfare, Juvenile, and Family Law Conference: Aug. 25-28
• Grant Writing Class: Sept. 5-6
• 2013 Addiction Treatment Technology Summit: Sept. 19-20

Juvenile Justice Reform

• The Sting of Juvenile Detention (JJIE.org)
  When young people held in San Diego County’s juvenile hall are disciplined with pepper spray, guards at the Kearny Mesa Juvenile Detention Facility ask afterwards if they want a shower. The best response, says former youth offender Ian Arellano, is “no.” Water reactivates the sting—which then washes down your body, he explains. Instead of affecting just your arms or face, suddenly every pore burns.
• Providing Teddy Bears for Nueces County Juvenile Justice Center (KIIITV.com)
  It may not sound like a big deal -- the Nueces County Juvenile Justice Center, dangerously close to running out of teddy bears -- but it turns out, it is. "A lot of these kids that come in here are sad and confused, and traumatized," Chesney said. "And sometimes just the smallest gestures, like a stuffed animal, will help break the ice and allow them to talk more freely and feel more comfortable in talking to me."
• MacArthur Pledges New $15 million to Juvenile Justice Reform (JJIE.org)
  The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced it will increase its juvenile justice reform funding by some $15 million, a major part of which will be used to establish the new Models for Change Resource Center Partnership. “Right now there are no go-to places to get the kind of information, resources, toolkits, [and] access to colleagues who have ‘been there done that,’” for would-be juvenile justice reform advocates, said Laurie Garduque, director of justice reform for the MacArthur Foundation.
• Fixing Juvie Justice (KPBS.org)
  Young people in the United States are entering the youth justice system in shocking numbers, and many seem to come out worse than when they went in. The staggering costs and recidivism — more than half of incarcerated kids are likely to recommit crimes after being released — have led people to wonder if there is a better way to deal with youth offenders and whether exposure to the system itself could in fact be perpetuating a life of crime.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recently announced the launch of the new Models for Change Resource Center Partnership. The four Resource Centers in the Partnership will be available to help provide prosecutors, defenders, judges, policymakers, advocates, probation officers, and mental health and social service agencies with much needed technical assistance, trainings, tools, and resources to help advance juvenile justice reform across the country.
The Partnership presents an exciting opportunity for many of us in the juvenile justice movement to build on this work and be a part of a positive wave of change for kids, their families, and their communities.
Expert staff is on hand at each of the Resource Centers to provide tools, training, and technical assistance in focus on areas critical to such progress. These areas, and the relevant Resource Center, are:

• The Mental Health and Juvenile Justice Collaborative for Change: A Training, Technical Assistance and Education Center, focusing on response to mental health needs;
• The National Juvenile Defender Center, focusing on stronger legal defense for indigent youth;
• The Status Offense Reform Center, focusing on interventions for youth charged with status offenses (activities that are criminalized for those under 18, e.g., truancy, running away, curfew violations); and,
• The Robert F. Kennedy National Resource Center for Juvenile Justice, focusing on coordination of practices and policies for youth involved in both the juvenile justice and child welfare systems, and enhancement of probation system practices.

Nearly 120 teens and young adults from 27 different states met in Washington, D.C. last week to participate in the annual Coalition for Juvenile Justice’s summit, Empowering Young Leaders for Juvenile Justice Reform.
The Summit, which seeks to cultivate and empower young juvenile justice advocates, invited 16-30 year olds passionate about juvenile justice advocacy to a weekend filled with youth advisory meetings and presentations on topics such as disproportionate minority contact and the school-to-prison pipeline.
During one session discussing youth organizing and advocacy, Rashad Hawkins, Youth Organizer at Just Kids Partnership, urged participants to think strategically about how they want to effect change. Additionally, Hawkins walked through the steps of how to organize and advocate, advising participants to:

• Set short-term, intermediate and long-term goals
• Create resource pools of money, in-kind goods and space
• Identify primary and secondary target individuals that can help implement change sought
• Use the media to promote causes
• Use tactics, such as events, public hearings or strikes that make sense to the audience.

We all know how much influence the media wields; let's use that power for the greater good!
Thanks to Faces and Voices of Recovery, young people and their family members can learn how to communicate more effectively with the media, as well as friends and family, about the reality of recovery. 
In two 90-minute webinars, trainers Justin Luke Riley, of Young People in Recovery, and Pat Taylor, of Faces and Voices of Recovery, use communications tools like human interest and media stories to reach policymakers, educate the public and recruit new members to the recovery movement.
I encourage you to take advantage of the free online training tools and watch the online webinars  to create your own strong messages and make a difference in your community.  
 
  
 

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

• Youth Service Improvement: Closes Aug. 11
• Volunteer Generation Fund FY13: Closes Aug. 9

Juvenile Justice Reform

• Massachusetts Senate Votes UNANIMOUSLY to Pass Raise the Age Bill (CFJJ News)
  "We wanted to share the exciting news that the Massachusetts Senate voted unanimously today (40-0) in favor of legislation to raise the age of juvenile court jurisdiction to include seventeen year olds! We are tremendously grateful to all of you for all of your calls, emails, letters, and support over the entire campaign."
• Calls For Juvenile Justice Reform Grow In Florida (WJCT.org)
  The calls for juvenile justice reform in Florida are growing, as advocates turn to research to prove that more robust juvenile diversion programs for first-time offenders can prevent kids from dropping out of school.
• Renewed Push to Raise Age of Being Tried as Adult (NYTimes.com)
  Democratic state lawmakers, community leaders and rights advocates on Thursday renewed a push to raise to 18 the age at which a defendant can be tried as an adult in New York.
• More Flexibility in Juvenile Court (News-Gazette.com)
  Juvenile courts in Illinois now will be trusted with handling the cases of some minors previously tried as adults. It's a good thing that the cases against most 17-year-olds arrested for misdemeanors and felonies will be resolved in juvenile court beginning Jan. 1.

The Anonymous People, a new documentary film about the over 23 million Americans living in long-term recovery from alcohol and other drug addiction, examines the deeply entrenched social stigma has kept recovery voices silent and faces hidden for decades. Via the website:

The vacuum has been filled with sensational mass media depictions of people with addiction that perpetuate a lurid fascination with the dysfunctional side of what is a preventable and treatable health condition. Just like women with breast cancer, or people with HIV/AIDS, a grass roots social justice movement is emerging. Courageous addiction recovery advocates have come out of the shadows and are organizing to end discrimination and move toward recovery-based solutions.
The moving story of The Anonymous People is told through the faces and voices of citizens, leaders, volunteers, corporate executives, public figures, and celebrities who are laying it all on the line to save the lives of others just like them. This passionate new public recovery movement aims to transform public opinion, engage communities and elected officials, and finally shift problematic policy toward lasting solutions.

The Anonymous People - Theatrical Trailer from Greg Williams on Vimeo.

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.