Youth Criminal Legal Reform
CoLab engages in system and multi-sector projects to improve the responsiveness of existing juvenile justice practices to youth developmental needs as well as working to build upstream community capacity to avoid criminal legal process altogether, when possible.
Our Work Advancing Youth Criminal Legal Reform
YOUTH WELLNESS ZONES
The Youth Wellness Zone initiative is a place-based, collective-impact approach to create meaningful, positive change in youth mental wellness in Washington state. “Zones,” hyperlocal geographic regions, utilize community expertise and engagement to identify needs and create change in built and social environments, service entities, and local policies. This learning collaborative currently includes four communities: Northeast Spokane (The ZONE at the North East Community Center Association), Yakima Valley Partners for Education, Renton Innovation Zone Partnership, and Greater Parkland (Kids’ Mental Health Pierce County). Each of these zones specifically engage young people in their communities in defining wellness, identifying areas for improvement, and actioning place-based innovation to directly and indirectly improve individual youth mental wellbeing.
hOUSING STABILITY FOR YOUTH (H-SYNC)
H-SYNC is a prevention tool for youth homelessness developed by the CoLab team in collaboration with workgroups in Snohomish and Kitsap Counties. The model uses routine practices already embedded in court systems to automatically identify and refer youth and families to needed prevention/intervention services. Learn more, here.
OPPORTUNITY BASED PROBATION (OBP)
CoLab partners with Pierce County to facilitate the implementation and preliminary analysis of the OBP program, wherein youth create meaningful goals and incentives that reward prosocial behavior. Learn more, here.
Past Work
aCCELERATING RESEARCH USE IN COURTS (ARC)
With growing calls for justice systems, especially juvenile justice systems, to integrate developmental and behavioral health science within all aspects of the justice process, it is critical to develop a standardized measure of how individuals use research evidence within these systems. With ARC, CoLab developed and tested a new tool for measuring the use of research evidence in a sample of juvenile court leaders across multiple states. Learn more, here.