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  • Calgary Youth Justice
    • SVP Involvement
    • "Opening DOORS", CYJS 2009
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• Evaluation and Outcomes
• How to Be Supported

Innovation: From vision to reality

Calgary Youth Justice Society (CYJS) builds engaged communities to support youth at risk and in conflict with the law to get back on track. We provide fundamental resources and guidance to Calgary’s Youth Justice Committees comprised of  local community volunteers who help young people who have committed a minor offence to learn and grow from the experience.

Volunteers are encouraged to build on a young person’s strengths, and outcomes may involve experiencing success with a skill or ability, repairing harm to a victim, engaging in meaningful volunteer work, and addressing some of their challenges through referrals to programs and services offered by other agencies in Calgary.  What the Committee decides as an outcome for each young person is a reflection of the individual and their unique circumstances and, as a result, volunteers have designed many creative consequence ideas over the past 12 years. 

Some challenges emerged that presented a new opportunity for growth:

• creative consequence ideas were not being shared between committees and between volunteers
• communicating new programs and services from the Society out to the volunteers was inefficient
• changes to contact information and the current status of programs was difficult to track
• gaps in needed services was unknown
• there was no common place available to store the most current and accurate information that all volunteers could access.

In short, we needed a better way to capture and share knowledge to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of volunteer efforts so that all of our young people have the same opportunities and value of service.

This is one example where SVP’s involvement in our organization has really allowed us to build our capacity. The flexibility to allocate financial resources to areas of greatest need in addition to access to SVP partnerships creates opportunities to develop and act on ideas of innovation to improve the difference we are making in the community. SVP contributions through both financial and volunteer resources working through the Development & Community Outreach Project, has led to the exciting implementation of DOORs (Database of Opportunities and Resources).

DOORs will:

• Give Youth Justice Committee volunteers access to up-to-date programs and services for youth
• Capture creative consequences developed by individual volunteers and YJC’s to be shared across the city and province
• Help volunteers to search suitable consequences for youth based on the type of offence they committed, their social challenges, interests, age and gender
• Improve the efficiency and appropriateness of referrals of youth to outside agencies
• Offer flexibility to quickly develop and add partnerships to meet new demands or gaps in services
• Enable a more responsive and consistent communication between Committees and the Society

As a support system for the Committees, we aim to achieve and maintain the highest level of quality and consistency throughout the 25 Youth Justice Committees and the youth they serve.  The generous and ongoing contributions of SVP Calgary and some very significant contributions from individual partners have resulted in an increase in both our capacity and progress towards our vision. Our goal of providing access to the most effective opportunities for every young person who is referred to a Youth Justice Committees see is now closer than ever.