Courts, service providers, and child welfare agencies from three tribes (Yurok Nation, Hoopa Tribe, and Karuk Tribe) and two counties (Humboldt County and Del Norte County) are working together to develop joint jurisdiction healing to wellness courts to better serve their communities and to address opioid use which has impacted the region particularly hard. Judge Korey Wahwusuck came onsite as a subject matter expert and mentor. She gave a keynote speech, and also provided valuable insight and input throughout the meetings.
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Desired outcomes for the site vitis included:
1. We will have a shared understanding of the impact of substance use and the needs facing tribal members, their families, and their communities.
2. We will learn how joint jurisdictional approaches—courts, coordinated prevention, and coordinated intervention—can better meet these needs than either jurisdiction going it alone.
3. We will learn how the QIC program can assist the tribal-county collaborations with prevention and intervention for pregnant women and their families and explore how we can lay the foundation to evaluate the joint jurisdictional approach of using evaluation of promising, culturally appropriate practices
4. We will share our understanding of what is currently in place for prevention and intervention for pregnant women and their families in our jurisdictions.
5. Each tribal-county collaboration will be able to identify the strengths of its collaboration and strategies to build capacity to better serve tribal members, their families, and their communities.
6. We will have an understanding of the goals of the tribal-county collaboration, its leadership structure, its decision-making process, and an opportunity to consider what we can bring to the collaboration’s action planning process to better serve tribal members, their families, and their communities.
7. We will have an understanding of our next steps immediately following the site visit and our roles and responsibilities and accomplishing those tasks.
The Northern California Tribal Court Coalition (NCTCC) decided to have their two demonstration sites meet as one team for the site visit for a multitude of reasons having to do with overlap. Yurok is in both demonstration sites; Humboldt is only in one, but the Superior Court judge from Humboldt is being used as a subject matter expert for the development of the joint jurisdiction court in the second demonstration site; United Indian Health Services (UIHS) provides services to the target population for both demonstration sites; the target population may fall under the jurisdiction of the courts in one jurisdiction, but receive services/have their children in the other jurisdiction. The Yurok Tribe hosted the meeting at their Tribal Headquarters in Klamath California. Over thirty participants attended each day. Disciplines represented included Superior Court judges from both Humboldt and Del Norte Counties, judges from all three tribal courts, court staff from all five courts, staff from the collaborative family wellness court that is currently operational, county social services, social services from all three tribes, the county Office of Public Health, the California Office of Tribal Affairs, the California Office of Child Abuse Prevention, and medical and substance use disorder providers from the county and from Indian Health Services.
The goal of the trip was to further assess the status of implementation of CAPTA/CARA, assess the status of implementation of a “seamless continuum of care” for SUD affected families, and to assess the status of the development of the joint jurisdiction family wellness courts so that action planning could move forward. The Change Team was hoping to better establish the relationship with the staff of the sites, engage the medical care providers in a discussion, better understand the status of implementation of CAPTA/CARA in California, and facilitate a conversation that allowed the sites to develop concrete steps that could be incorporated into an Action Plan.
Planning for the visit continued until the night prior to the meeting because the Yurok Tribe, who was hosting the event, requested time on the morning agenda to have a Yurok linguist speak about what “wellness” means in a Yurok world view. This led to a bit of scrambling to revise the timing of other presentations, but, given the fact that the target population consists of Native families and the fact that there were a number of new state and county partners in the room, this presentation helped set the tone and tenor of the meeting and the established the fact that the project would be approached differently than projects that target other populations. Debriefing after day one was held with the judges, and there were a lot of side conversations going on during the break, but for the most part, the group met and discussed issues as a group.
Key Issues/Topics Discussed included:
1. That mainstream ideas of wellness would have to be supplemented by Native ideas of wellness;
2. CAPTA/CARA implementation nationwide and locally;
3. How joint jurisdiction solutions can better serve populations in many areas, including child welfare;
4. QIC Evaluation and local evaluations (for the demonstration sites to use themselves);
5. Project being developed by Humboldt County to address perinatal substance use
6. Next steps
TA report finalized by Children and Family Futures and TLPI.
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