Vera helps local communities and government officials strive to reduce crime by focusing on discrete problems and crafting innovative responses that prevent crime, hold offenders accountable, and heal.
The Sexual Violence Prevention Initiative (SVPI) is a partnership with the New Jersey Coalition Against Sexual Assault and 22 community-based agencies that serve victims of sexual violence and their communities. Its goal is to integrate primary prevention strategies into the agencies’s existing activities.
Vera’s Accessing Safety Initiative (ASI) helps its partner jurisdictions—states and cities—enhance the capacity of their social services and criminal justice systems to assist women with disabilities & Deaf women who have experienced domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking.
Common Justice offers an alternative to the traditional court process for youth charged with felonies such as assault, robbery, and burglary. Project staff bring together people immediately affected by a crime to acknowledge the harm done, address the needs of the harmed party, and agree on sanctions other than incarceration to hold the responsible party accountable. The project, which is based in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, seeks to repair harm, break cycles of violence, and decrease the system’s heavy reliance on incarceration. It operates with the generous support of the Blue Ridge Foundation, the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Viola W. Bernard Foundation, the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, the Stoneleigh Center, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Vera’s Washington DC Office is working with the congressionally mandated National Prison Rape Elimination Commission (NPREC) to develop standards to detect, prevent, and respond to sexual assault in jails, prisons, lock-ups, and immigration, juvenile, and community-corrections facilities.
Significant advances in our country’s responses to violence against women have occurred since the passage of the landmark federal Violence Against Women Act of 1994. Unfortunately, many practitioners working to address violence against women do not have ready access to information about successful approaches that could enhance their efforts. The Promising Practices Initiative is leading a national effort for the U.S. Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women to identify and share promising practices that have been developed since 1994 to address domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking.
The Supervised Visitation Initiative (SVI) works with supervised visitation programs funded by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women to enhance their capacity to effectively and safely serve families who have experienced domestic violence. The Initiative provides these programs with training, tailored consultation, and access to information on best practices from programs across the country.
The official debut, today, of the Center on Victimization and Safety has me thinking about the importance of collaboration, one of the center’s key values.
A new five-minute video shows how one department of corrections helps identify people's social supports with the goal of improving outcomes at facilities and in the community.
Director, Common Justice
