New Website Helps Federal Staff Support Comprehensive Community Initiatives

The Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has established a new website, cciToolsforFeds.org, offering a wealth of tools and resources to help Federal staff plan, support, and help sustain Comprehensive Community Initiatives (CCIs), local community interventions that seek to improve outcomes for youth and families through systems change.

CCIs foster broad-based collaborations to improve the governance, policies, practices, and values of organizations and systems involved in promoting the health and well-being of youth. CCIs can address school readiness, high school graduation rates, child abuse and neglect, suicide, substance abuse, delinquency and violence, and many other issues. What sets a CCI apart from a conventional service delivery program is its emphasis on systems change.

This new website helps Federal staff align funding, management, evaluation, and technical assistance to maintain the focus on systems change in partnership with community organizations and agencies serving children, youth, and families.

The website includes the following resources:

Learn the Basics

• Explains CCIs and systems change.
• Offers advice about when it makes sense to develop a CCI.
• Maps the steps to plan the initiative and track its progress.

Plan, Manage and Sustain Your CCI Project

• Offers guidance on forming Federal partnerships, planning site funding, developing technical assistance to project sites, and creating evaluations.
• Features comprehensive answers to key questions often asked by Federal staff.

How To

• Explains how to develop and write solicitations, plan budgets, and select and orient CCI project sites.
• Includes detailed checklists and links to sample work products.

Find Tools and Resources

• Offers a "toolkit" (training materials, case studies, templates and forms, and suggestions for further reading) for Federal staff and CCI sites.
• Assists with planning funding, developing a solicitation, creating a sustainability plan, writing agreements and contracts, developing Federal and community partnerships, structuring technical assistance, and designing an evaluation.

Every day, professionals involved with CCIs are learning more about what makes a CCI effective and how the Federal government can best support community change efforts. The goal of www.cciToolsforFeds.org is to serve as a living resource that reflects the most up-to-date knowledge in the field. The site will be updated regularly as new information becomes available.