[Editor’s Note: Dr. Laura Nissen played an advisory role in the development of Vera’s Adolescent Portable Therapy (APT) project. Dr. Nissen is the national director for Reclaiming Futures. Vera provides technical support for the Reclaiming Futures site in Nassau County, NY.]

Reclaiming Futures is a national program going into its 12th year of working with local juvenile justice agencies, treatment agencies, local community leaders, and community members to build an integrated system of care and opportunity for young people involved in delinquency and substance abuse. As with Vera’s acclaimed Adolescent Portable Therapy project, Reclaiming Futures navigated an area substantially lacking in standards or protocolsthose had to emerge during the course of the innovation. In addition, both Reclaiming Futures and APT, to be effective, had to do more than think in terms of simply implementing a program. In recent years at Reclaiming Futures, we have begun to seriously consider an identity that it is equal parts program and social movement.

Even early on, we knew that when representatives of multiple systems sat down together to imagine how to make the necessary changes in their community, it would require that professionals inside each of the systemsincluding the judiciary, juvenile probation, and adolescent treatmentcreate an environment where innovations and progress could occur. We also knew it would take the efforts of community leaders and members to ensure that any changes made were durable and authentic. In fact, we found that successful change depended on community members using their grass-roots vantage point to push the judiciary, policy makers, and professionals in probation, child welfare, and treatment for accountability, openness, and momentum.

In making this leap, we were attempting something unusual: to meld an “initiative” with a “movement.” Initiatives are usually borne out of the need to make reforms that extend well beyond the ability of any one organization and often go significantly beyond traditional organizational practice.
Initiatives usually involve multiple layers of input, successive rounds of centralized implementation planning forged from consensus-building efforts, development of standards, and are generally driven by professionals within powerful bureaucracies such as the juvenile justice system. 
They rely on another relatively new area of organizational studyimplementation scienceto provide conceptual and practical frameworks for understanding how organizations introduce and successfully integrate innovations into practice. Reclaiming Futures relied on many of these qualities of initiatives.

In contrast, social movements focus on the development of advocates. They are rooted in social justice concerns, are grassroots-driven and managed, and are frequently intentionally disruptive, agitating and mobilizing when their voices are not heard or included in essential decision-making. Reclaiming Futures drew on this approach when it included a formal seat at the decision-making table for community members who did not hold formal positions of power in the larger systems.

 Learning to navigate the tension between the incremental nature of an initiative and the often more fluid process of engaging community constituencies in conversations  about their enduring lack of power, position, and voice has been a formidable challenge for Reclaiming Futures. Yet it may have helped us identify the space where we’ve done our best work.

Is Reclaiming Futures an initiative or a movement? Is there even a name for the space between the two? This may seem like a purely academic question. But I’d like to suggest something that the experience of Reclaiming Futures supports: that the most enduring change happens in the space between successfully changing institutions and engaging the community members who both authorize and benefit from them.