Overview of the Family Justice Center Alliance

The Family Justice Center Alliance (www.familyjusticecenter.org) was launched in 2006 in response to the increasing demand for technical assistance from existing and pending Centers across the world. The Family Justice Center Alliance serves as the official technical assistance provider for the United States Department of Justice for federally funded centers and also works with centers outside the federal initiative and abroad. There are currently 55 operational centers in the United States with three international Centers (Canada, Mexico, and the UK).  In addition, there are over 50 Centers currently developing in the United States, Europe, Jordan, Bahrain, Africa, and Central America. 

In addition to technical assistance, training and consulting, the Family Justice Center Alliance hosts an annual international conference, provides shared learning opportunities such as staff exchange programs, international internships, web-based education programs, and training in the area of family violence. The Alliance also operates the Family Justice Center Institute sponsored by the Verizon Foundation.  The Institute is developing new victim service delivery models, innovative pilot projects in Family Justice Centers, identifying best practices in Centers, and promoting increased victim safety through the use of technology and innovative on-line training, technical assistance, and education.

Best Practices Model

In October, 2003, President George W. Bush announced the creation of the President’s Family Justice Center Initiative. The $20 million Initiative began a movement toward more “one stop shop,” co-located, multi-disciplinary service centers. The President based his Initiative on the San Diego Family Justice Center model (www.familyjusticecenter.org) which opened in 2002 with staff from 25 public and private agencies co-located together in order to reduce the number of places victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and elder abuse must go to receive needed services. While including many partners, the basic partners in any Family Justice Center are police officers, prosecutors, and community-based advocates.

More recently, the Obama Administration has supported on-going funding for the Alliance to provide technical assistance to organizations and communities across the United States that are seeking to develop diverse models of co-located, multi-agency services irrespective of the partner agencies in a community that may be willing to co-locate.  Community-based agencies and government-based agencies can often save money and increase effectiveness of service delivery to victims and their children by locating services under one roof instead of expecting victims to travel from agency to agency and place to place to get the needed services.

The Family Justice Center model has been identified as a best practice in the field of domestic violence intervention and prevention services by numerous local, state and national organizations including the U.S. Department of Justice. (See www.ovw.usdoj.gov/docs/family_justice_center_overview_12_07.pdf). The documented and published outcomes in the Family Justice Center model have included: reduced homicides; increased victim safety; increased autonomy and empowerment for victims; reduced fear and anxiety for victims and their children; reduced recantation and minimization by victims when wrapped in services and support; increased efficiency in collaborative services to victims among service providers; increased prosecution of offenders; and dramatically increased community support services to victims and their children. (See Casey Gwinn, Gael Strack, Hope for Hurting Families: Creating Family Justice Centers Across America, Volcano Press 2006; “The Family Justice Center Collaborative Model,”  27 St. Louis University Public Law Review, 79, 2007, pp. 79-120).

Congress recognized the importance of the Family Justice Center movement by including Family Justice Centers as a “purpose area” in Title I of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA 2005). Using a model of collaboration to provide “wraparound” services from one location, the Family Justice Center concept seeks to marshal all available resources in a community into a coordinated, centralized service delivery system with accountability to victims and survivors for the effectiveness of the model. As the movement is expanding, more and more emphasis is being placed on developing uniquely local multi-agency co-location models depending on the available governmental and non-governmental organizations in a particular community and the willingness of those agencies to co-locate their services in order to increase effectiveness and efficiency in meeting the needs of victims of family violence-related trauma.  The model is also being applied to primary prevention approaches as well and includes a major focus on collaborative learning models where networks of Centers are created to cover a region with multi-disciplinary teams that can then share lessons learned, best practices, and promising approaches.