Safer Tomorrows: The Grand Forks Defending Childhood Initiative

In this podcast, Kari Kerr and Kristi Hall-Jiran talk about Safer Tomorrows, Grand Forks, North Dakota’s Defending Childhood Initiative. Safer Tomorrows implemented universal violence prevention programming in public, private, and rural schools across Grand Forks County, beginning with pre-kindergarten and extending to high school. The initative is part of the Department of Justice’s Defending Childhood Demonstration Program, which funded eight sites across the country to  respond to the problem of children’s exposure to violence. The Center for Court Innovation has produced a report on Safer Tomorrows, a series of reports on five other sites, and a report that condenses lessons learned across the sites. Resources mentioned in this podcast: Safer Tomorrows The Community Violence Intervention Center Al’s Pals Friendships at Work Lessons from Literature Digital Citizenship Coaching Boys into Men Lutheran Social Services Restorative Justice Healthy Families The Fourth R The following is a transcript AVNI MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Hi. I’m Avni Majithia-Sejpal, senior writer at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another episode of our New Thinking Podcast. Today, we’re here to talk about Safer Tomorrows. Safer Tomorrows was established in Grand Forks County, North Dakota, as part of the Department of Justice-funded Defending Childhood Demonstration Project, which was designed to address children’s exposure to violence through eight demonstration sites across the country. We, at the Center for Court Innovation, have just released individual process evaluation reports on six of these eight sites, as well as a multi-site report that condenses the lessons learned through our research. Today, from Safer Tomorrows, we are talking to: Kari Kerr, director of community innovations at the Community Violence Intervention Center and leadership team member of the Safer Tomorrows project, amongst others; and Kristi Hall-Jiran, executive director of the Community Violence Intervention Center. Kari and Kristi, welcome to our podcast. KARI KERR: Thank you for having us. KRISTI HALL-JIRAN: Thanks. We’re glad to be here. MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Let’s begin by talking a little bit about the project itself. Safer Tomorrows aimed to implement universal prevention programming in Grand Forks County. My question is, what made you decide to focus on school-based prevention programming? KERR: I think there are a couple of factors that went into our decision. The main one was, our state had just actually passed anti-bullying laws requiring schools to develop some type of a policy or a response, and so the timing was really good in terms of approaching the school system. Then, we also know that, obviously, for our school system, we can have a wide reach of youth that are attending school. Certainly, from kindergarten all the way up to 12th grade, and we went beyond that and looked at some of the pre-schools in our community as well. HALL-JIRAN: I think just to add to that, too. We also had really spent some time developing a good, strong working relationship with the schools in several years before the project. We really felt like we already had the leadership of the school system on board, the superintendent served on our agency’s board of directors, and so really felt that the timing was right. We already have the collaborative relationship and so the natural outcome was to focus on that way. MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: When we talk about violence, what are some of the forms of violence, specifically pertaining to children and teenagers, that need to be addressed urgently in your county? KERR: When we first developed our Safer Tomorrows project, we, of course, wanted to be very inclusive of all types of violence and really make sure that we were addressing anything that could affect the child, and we also wanted to look at how to prevent violence and not just to intervene. We did want to also look at the things that were most impacting our children. What we did before we even started developing our programming was really to do a needs assessment as to what the most prevalent forms of violence were. As we looked at existing statistics and then gathered additional data, what we found was that the kinds of violence that we saw the most in our county was pertaining mostly to bullying in the school system, or just anywhere, and then also children exposed to domestic violence at home. Though we had pure statistics on dating violence, we heard from a lot of our stakeholders that they felt that that was a pretty primary issue as well. Though we tried to address all of the issues, those are the areas that we’re really focusing on. MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Can you talk to us a little bit about the different features or highlights of the project? HALL-JIRAN: We’ve looked at it in three different areas. We designed the program around intervention effort, so any child age 0 to 17 that is being impacted in some way by violence, we wanted to make sure we were finding a way to intervene. Then, we also looked at prevention. How could we start building the kind of programming in our community that would prevent this type of violence from happening so that two generations from now we don’t even have to have these conversations anymore? Then, the third piece, we really tried to build a very strong data and evaluation component because we really wanted to base our decisions on available data and then ongoing evaluation so that we could treat what we implemented as we found out if that was working or not, or as different types of violence change and, hopefully, if we were seeing good results we could start making some of those adjustments. As far as specific things that are under each of those areas, maybe I’ll have Kari talk about that a little bit. KERR: Sure. We were able to implement a variety of different prevention programs, many of which are evidence-based. Some of those included Al’s Pals, which is for our youngest population, that’s bullying prevention program. We also implemented “The Fourth R” for health classes, Friendships at Work, which is a positive friendship curriculum. A couple of different programs looking at some of the online issues that can happen with students, that would be Digital Citizenship. Then, we also have one of our schools implement Lessons from Literature. Then we did Coaching Boys into Men. We really had a variety of prevention programming starting from, again the early years all the way up to 12th grade. As Kristi mentioned, we had a lot of intervention services offered as far as specialized therapy services and the Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota has provided restorative justice programming and Healthy Families. We’ve also been able to work with some of our families … MAJITHIA-SEJPAL: Given that you’re targeting children and teenagers in such a wide age range, from 0 through 17, how did you adapt your methods to different ages and specifically to the youngest children? HALL-JIRAN: You’re right. That’s a very wide age range for, not just prevention, but also for area of intervention as well. As Kari mentioned, for the youngest kid, we implemented Al’s Pals. It’s a puppet program. It’s basically working with kids as they’re playing, so we really try to adapt to what would be age-appropriate. As we got more into elementary school, the curriculum focuses more on respect and being kind to each other and all those kinds of things. Then as we moved in the middle school age, we looked a little bit more at anti-bullying and respectful friendship, and what would healthy friendship look like, how do we treat each other, those kinds of things. Then, of course, as we got to the high school level, we looked more at dating violence and healthy relationships. Really just trying to adapt the programming that we picked to really sit with these age groups and wha...