A Better Path Forward: Restructuring Systems to Support Crossover YouthAbout this Event
The Center for Juvenile Justice Reform, in partnership with Casey Family Programs, is delighted to invite you to the 2021 Janet Reno Forum. The Forum will explore the paths systems can take to support crossover youth—young people who are involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.
From July 26 to July 29, we will center the experiences of youth and families impacted by the juvenile justice and child welfare systems through a virtual conference that allows for national participation.
How can we restructure our systems to better support crossover youth?
Alongside a host of high-profile keynote speakers and expert presentations, we will spotlight opportunities for change in a series of topical sessions.
- Addressing the Needs of Youth sessions, we will focus on the needs of commercially sexually exploited youth, youth of color, and LGBTQ+ youth.
- Building New Roads Between Systems sessions, we will concentrate on the value of data, case practice, and leveraging the Family First Prevention Services Act.
- Using Experiences to Shape Systems sessions, we will hear directly from staff, families, and young people about their experiences within juvenile justice and child welfare systems.
For more than a decade, the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform has collaborated with partners in 23 states and more than 120 jurisdictions to implement the Crossover Youth Practice Model.
The Forum will leverage this wealth of practical knowledge—and the voices of diverse practitioners and constituents across the country—to engage in a robust conversation on how to improve our youth- and family-serving systems. At the conclusion of the Forum, participants can expect to be prepared to take immediate steps toward helping our most vulnerable youth.
The forum will be held virtually from 1:00 pm to 4:15 pm EDT on Monday, July 26th to Thursday, July 29th.
Accommodation requests related to a disability should be sent to [email protected] by June 4, 2021. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill requests.
In the run-up to the Forum this July, we will be releasing spotlight materials focused on the topics that will be discussed at the four-day virtual conference. In the weeks and months to come, we’ll dive deeper into sub-topics in the field, such as addressing the needs of LGBTQ+ youth, youth of color, and commercially sexually exploited children. We will also be rolling out our lineup of speakers, so visit this page often!
BIOGRAPHY
Sharrica Miller is a doctorally prepared, board certified pediatric nurse practitioner with over 15 years of experience in nursing and nursing education. After spending 12 years of her childhood in foster care, Dr. Miller went on to obtain her BSN from Howard University. She later earned her PhD from UCLA in 2017 with a dissertation that explored transition readiness and health services utilization in former foster youth.
Dr. Miller is a foster youth mentor, advocate, and researcher who recently won the 2019 Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity award at California State University, Fullerton and the 2021 Casey Family Foundation Alumni award for her work with foster youth both on campus and in the community. Her advocacy work was also featured in a national televised LinkedIn commercial as part of their 2018 Heroes Campaign. She is committed to improving the health and well-being of transitional age foster youth through research and legislative action.
In this webinar, Michael Umpierre will interview filmmaker Santiago Rizzo about his childhood, his new film "The Only Question," and how he hopes his work will change the national conversation around crossover youth.
After moving in with Tim Moellering at the age of 13, Santiago became an emancipated minor and Student Body President of Berkeley High School. In 2003, Santiago graduated with a 3.55 GPA from Stanford with a degree in Economics and a minor in Psychology. He then worked for Credit Suisse as an analyst in Institutional Equity Sales, as an analyst at Intrepid Capital and then became a portfolio manager at Straus Partners. When Tim’s pancreatic cancer metastasized, Santiago took a sabbatical from Wall Street to be with Tim during his final year in Berkeley where they both bought a home. During that year, Tim and Santiago finished writing a screenplay together. When Tim took his last breath on January 18, 2011, Santiago promised Tim he would make the script they wrote together into a movie. With the backing of his old boss, Mickey Straus, Santiago went back to NYC to launch an alternative energy hedge fund which he then shut down when Mickey died. He sold his home to raise the necessary funds and began this “Quest”. In May 2021, Santiago finished a recut of "Quest", now titled "The Only Question", to be shared with the world. You can watch his eulogy at Tim's memorial at https://thetruthalwaysrises.com/
This week, we continue our series of releases regarding our line-up of speakers and panelists for the Forum. We could not be more proud or excited to announce that Kristin Henning will be joining us in July as a featured speaker!
Kristin Henning is the Blume Professor of Law and the Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Georgetown Law, where she and her law students represent youth accused of delinquency in Washington, DC. Kris was previously the Lead Attorney for the Juvenile Unit of the D.C. Public Defender Service and is currently the Director of the Mid-Atlantic Juvenile Defender Center.
Kris has trained state actors across the country on the impact of racial bias in the juvenile and criminal legal systems. Her workshops help stakeholders recognize their own biases and develop strategies to counter it. Kris also worked closely with the McArthur Foundation’s Juvenile Indigent Defense Action Network to develop a 41-volume Juvenile Training Immersion Program (JTIP), a national training curriculum for juvenile defenders. She now co-hosts, with the National Juvenile Defender Center (NJDC), an annual week-long JTIP summer academy for defenders. In 2019, Kris partnered with NJDC to launch a Racial Justice Toolkit for youth advocates, and again in 2020, to launch the Ambassadors for Racial Justice program, a year-long program for juvenile defenders committed to challenging racial injustice in the juvenile legal system through litigation and systemic reform.
Kris writes extensively about race, adolescence, and policing. Her new book, , is forthcoming with Penguin Random House in 2021. Henning serves on the Board of Directors for the Center for Children’s Law and Policy, the ABA’s Juvenile Justice Standards Task Force, and ALI’s Restatement on Children and the Law project.
This week, we kick off a series of releases regarding our line-up of speakers and panelists for the Forum. We could not be more proud or excited to announce that Cyntoia Brown-Long will be joining us in July as a featured speaker!
Cyntoia Brown-Long is an author, speaker, and advocate for criminal justice reform and victims of trafficking.
BIOGRAPHYCyntoia had a difficult start in life. She was born to an alcoholic, teenage mother who was a victim of sex trafficking. Cyntoia experienced a sense of isolation, low self-esteem, and alienation that drove her straight into the hands of a predator. Cyntoia was trafficked during her early teenage years and, at the age of 16, was arrested for killing a man who solicited her for sex. She was tried as an adult and was sentenced to life in Pr*son without the chance of parole for 51 years. Her trafficker was never arrested. In Pr*son, Cyntoia’s life took a dramatic turn when the Pr*son education principal took her under her wing and introduced her to a spiritual path. She encouraged her to build a positive life in Pr*son and to resist the negative influences that lead to despair.
Cyntoia’s journey was a roller coaster ride that included a documentary about her life, a profound encounter with God, an unlikely romance, and, eventually, a commuted sentence by Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam. She received unprecedented national and international support from social media advocates, pastors, and celebrities and was released from Pr*son in Nashville, TN, on August 7, 2019.
Her memoir, Free Cyntoia: My Search for Redemption in the American Pr*son System (Atria Books), written while in Pr*son, documents her early years and the 15 years she was incarcerated and takes readers on a coming-of-age spiritual journey. Set against the shocking backdrop of a life behind bars and the injustice of sentencing sex-trafficked juveniles as adults, Cyntoia struggled to overcome a legacy of birth-family addiction and a lifetime of being ostracized and abandoned by society. Of her time in Pr*son, Cyntoia says, “I was just a teenager when I was sent to live behind a razor-wire fence. My entire coming of age was within the walls of the Tennessee Pr*son for Women.” She is a 2020 Nominee for the NCAAP Literary Image Award and has been featured as a guest columnist for the Washington Post.
Cyntoia hopes her story will not only inspire others but also shine a light on the injustice that people still face on a daily basis, especially the injustice to women and children in American prisons. She, with her husband, Jaime, is the founder of the Foundation for Justice, Freedom, and Mercy.
This week, we are proud to release a new research publication by Madeline Stern!
The 2021 Janet Reno Forum will explore how to restructure systems to better support crossover youth, centering the conversations on the experiences of youth and families impacted by the juvenile justice and child welfare systems. This includes dedicated Forum sessions examining how to best address the needs of youth, including commercially sexually exploited youth, youth of color, and LGBTQ+ youth.
In advance of these important discussions, this new CJJR publication highlights the critical need to ensure that systems fully support Black LGBTQ+ girls and nonbinary youth--a population that is at higher risk for crossover (i.e., becoming dually-involved in both the juvenile justice and child welfare systems) than their non-Black, non-LGBTQ+ peers.
The white paper also provides recommendations to mitigate this disparity and improve the experiences of and outcomes for this population of young people.
You can view a preview of the paper below, or download the publication: https://georgetown.box.com/s/zoxeg9576jwyy32ptbnol0006mevixoj
This week, we’re proud to release a new infographic featuring information about Crossover Youth. Learn more about who crossover youth are, and the unique challenges they face.
This week, we are proud to release a new Crossover Youth Spotlight Video on the efforts in the City of Alexandria, Virginia.
For nearly a year, communities have felt themselves depleted by the effects of COVID-19. The pandemic has caused many systems to triage their efforts, with all but the core functions of agencies being put on pause. Here, the Crossover Youth Practice Model (CYPM) team from the City of Alexandria, Virginia describes the ways in which their history of partnership, their strong leadership, and their multi-system planning for CYPM implementation have helped them maintain a focus on crossover youth, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. The team’s continued emphasis on system improvement for crossover youth underscores the imperative role that supportive leadership and personal connection play in achieving strong multi-system collaboration.
Event Venue
Online
USD 0.00 to USD 50.00
