Institute Intelligence, December 2024: Our Year by the Numbers
By Carla Sinclair, Senior Communications Associate
Welcome to the December edition of Institute Intelligence, coming to you as 2024 wraps up. It's been a busy year — as you can see in the next section — but we're looking forward to kicking off 2025 with a number of new projects, big progress on existing work, and exciting updates to how we communicate our work.
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Here are some specifics of what we got up to in 2024:
Advancing Justice
A year's worth of research in the Safety and Justice Challenge Year in Review
This week, we released the 2024 Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) Research Year in Review, a roundup of the latest research from sites across the initiative. As the national data intermediary and primary data and analytic partner for the SJC—as well as the manager of the SJC Research Consortium—we have a bird’s eye view of the data, strategies, and innovation happening in SJC communities across the country.
This edition of the Review summarizes research activities that took place throughout 2024, including new Research Consortium memberships, updates on newly funded work, and recently published research products, with a spotlight on our new work unpacking trends about women and survivors of violence in the criminal legal system. Find the Year in Review here.
Promoting Opportunity
Digging into the implementation and impact of the Criminal Justice Investment Initiative
Since 2015, we’ve worked with the Manhattan DA’s Office to administer close to $250M in strategic investments to more than 50 mental health, employment, education, and other programs across Manhattan. These have supported more than 34,000 people across New York City. This year, we released a major report summarizing CJII’s work over the last several years, and we hope this report can be a roadmap for funders and practitioners looking to build a better system of justice.
In addition to program implementation, we funded and oversaw a robust evaluation portfolio to gauge how these programs were being implemented and whether they were having the intended impact. These data-driven evaluations were used to both adjust program operations in real time as well as inform the research and practice fields in New York City and more widely, ensuring the lessons learned from CJII’s investments have impact long after funding is over. Thirty-three CJII-funded programs have been studied in a total of 18 independent evaluations.
This year, we’ve released evaluations of five CJII-funded programs:
College-in-Prison Reentry Initiative
A $7.3 million investment, CIP built partnerships between prisons, higher education institutions, and reentry service providers to give more individuals with the opportunity to achieve a quality education, with the goal of increasing their likelihood of success in the community after release. Read more.
Build-Out of Student Services (BOSS)
BOSS offers access to education, employment, and mentoring services to support formerly incarcerated women as they reenter their communities in New York City. Read more.
The West Harlem Community Reentry and Restoration Project (WHCRRP)
After large-scale law enforcement intervention in 2014 left the community disrupted and traumatized, the West Harlem Community Reentry and Restoration Project (WHCRRP) sought to support the people directly impacted as well as the community at large. Read more.
Center for Trauma Innovation (CTI)
In East Harlem, the Center for Trauma Innovation is supporting the healing journeys of individuals impacted by the criminal legal system with unique strategies to build relationships, provide innovative services, and respond to community needs. Read more.
Support, Lead, Achieve, Model (SLAM) and Manhattan Academy Plus (MAP)
Local, youth-focused programs in New York City are important in supporting young people as they transition out of foster care and into adulthood. Graham Windham’s SLAM and The Door’s MAP offered youth aging out of foster care flexible and personalized programming through mentorship and youth-driven services. Read more.
Optimizing Governments & Institutions
Applying an international framework to human rights in our state & local governments
December 10th is annually recognized as Human Rights Day. On this day, we reaffirm the importance of our national and international leaders developing the policies, partnerships, and practices that ensure human rights are protected worldwide; at home, the same should hold true at the state and local levels of government.
Through data-driven insights and community partnerships, ample opportunity exists to address the challenges which threaten the security of human rights in our cities, counties, and states. Comms Associate Alisa Orlowsky highlights a few of those partnerships we’ve seen working across America on our blog.
Are you a survivor of gender-based violence who has had contact with the criminal legal system?
We want to hear from you!
We started The Gender-Based Violence (GBV) Project to understand the challenges GBV survivors who have had contact with the criminal legal system face when accessing services from New York City government agencies and service providers. The project will gather insights through interviews with survivors and service providers and use these insights to propose recommendations to improve practices.
We are currently seeking survivors to interview about their experiences. Get all the details here—and reach out to us at gbvproject2025@gmail.com if you or someone you work with is willing and eligible to participate.
Analyzing data and hearing from businesses to learn about equity, challenges, and opportunities in City contracting.
We’ve partnered with the the NYC Department of Small Business Services (SBS) to conduct a Disparity Study examining equity in procurement and contracting by City agencies.
To conduct the study, CUNY ISLG is reaching to business owners to learn more about their businesses, barriers they have faced in doing business or attempting to do business with the City, how processes can be improved to further the City’s goals for fairness and equity.
All businesses can make their voices heard by responding to our brief Business Experience Survey, available in English, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, and Russian; soon to be available in Bengali, Arabic, and Korean.. This is your chance to tell the City what is and isn’t working in its contracting process, and what would help your business succeed.
The survey is open to all business owners and decision-makers and is expected to take roughly 10 minutes of your time. In exchange for completing the survey, you will be entered into a raffle to win one of 15 $200 gift cards.
Learn more about the project here.
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