NRRC Technical-Assistance -- Quick Chat Proposal
The Importance of Rural Reentry: Challenges, Strategies and Partnerships
Issue: Rural Reentry: Best Practices, Challenges, Barriers
Guests: Representatives from Altarum, CEO, CSH, and JLUSA
Facilitator: Roger Jarjoura
Coaches: Derrick Franke, Joe Williams, Cassandra Blakely
Producers: Felice and Shoshana
Target Audience: BJA & OJJDP SCA Grantees
Purpose:
On April 28, 2020, NRRC held a peer learning session with SCA rural grantees under the Mentoring and Community-Based Programs Track. This session afforded these grantees the opportunity to provide peer support, identify common challenges, discover meaningful strategies and tools to address challenges and identify lessons that can be shared across SCA tracks for rural grantees. Many of the challenges facing rural communities including housing, transportation, mental health and substance abuse, and employment.
Given the multiple, and often unique, challenges in rural areas this quick chat will take the learning session to the next level and expand it to all tracks, as many have grantees in rural communities. It will be designed to help strengthen their rural programs by focusing on specific areas raised in the learning session and highlight multisystem and interagency collaborations needed within their communities.
The quick chat will feature a series of short vignettes from rural SCA grantees across the country addressing select themes listed below, followed by subject matter experts providing valuable context and evidence-based lessons to the narratives. Specific areas for the session will highlight behavioral and mental health, workforce and employment, and housing organized by the themes noted below on challenges, strategies, and partnerships.
NRRC will also develop a 1-2 page brief to accompany the chat and be available to all grantees that provides background on reentry activities in rural settings, including why it’s unique and why it’s important to pay particular attention to it.
Format:
The NRRC will use a 90-minute quick chat format. The session will be organized under three themes: common challenges in rural settings; promising strategies to address challenges; and effective partnerships. Each segment will begin with one to two recorded vignette from a grantee and their associated coach, followed by the NRRC facilitator posing 2-3 questions to invited guests and manage a Q&A from the audience. The proposed guests for this chat are described below:
1. Grantee vignettes: Missouri Bootheel Regional Consortium; Middle Tennessee Rural Reentry Program
2. Diana Williams, Altarum; Christine Kidd, Center for Employment Opportunities; Ryan Moser, Corporation for Supportive Housing; Venus Woods, JLUSA Navigator from Alaska
Roger would guide the discussion and facilitate the Q and A. The final recording will be shared with grantees unable to make the quick chat. If needed, the Center will produce a FAQ document that can be posted alongside the recording.
Invitation:
The quick chat will be made available to SCA grantees, NRRC staff, partners, subject-matter experts, BJA and OJJDP.
Logistics:
The NRRC will use the WebEx platform to host the quick chat. A draft version of the questions and run of show will be made available to BJA and OJJDP to review.
Proposed Questions:
Quick Chats typically have 3-5 questions. For this topic, the following are proposed.
• Theme 1: Common Challenges in Rural Settings
o How can reentry in rural settings be especially difficult for returning citizens (e.g., transportation; housing)?
o What are the unique challenges reentry organizations face in rural settings (e.g., participant engagement)?
• Theme 2: Promising Strategies to Address Challenges
o What strategies have shown promise in connecting participants over large geographic areas (especially when returning citizens may be housing insecure, unemployed, or lack technological resources)?
o How can technology be used to overcome challenges?
• Theme 3: Effective Partnerships
o Which government and community agencies are essential partners in successful rural reentry initiatives?
o Which non-traditional partners are essential and why?
Next Steps:
NRRC (will BJA/OJJDP guidance) will identify grantees defined as rural. These sites will be invited to share their questions, challenges, and strategies prior to quick chat to inform the issue brief and provide context to the subject matter expert panelists. Other logistical action items, like a technical run-through, will be handled by the Center.
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