Grace Alternative 

 Innovative Thinking  is the key program of Grace Alternative to Incaration, where middle school students facing behavioral challenges, along with their mentors, engage in a structured support system.

 

This initiative offers services to youth on probation through Family Court, creating a safe-school environment that fosters high expectations, job opportunities, life skills development, positive self-expression, and strengthened family relationships.

 

Innovative Thinking offers young individuals daily activities that encompass:

•  Mentoring programs 

• Educational support 

• Employment readiness and career evaluation

• Life skills development, including peer support and financial literacy

• Community engagement through service projects such as gardening and local outreach

• Opportunities for artistic expression and creative voice 

• Recreational activities, including physical fitness 

• Entrepreneurship initiatives.

Promising Leaders focus on students who are chronically suspended from middle and high schools.Promising Leaders have developed a range of services designed to prevent and enriching young individual potential involvement in the criminal justice system uncultivated. Our program for youth includes:

• Preventing arrest of our high-risk youth

• Preventing family court judge to file charges by offering our program instead

• Preventing the detention of teens awaiting trial in Family Court

• Preventing young people age 17-25 awaiting trial in Criminal Court

• Preventing the incarceration of young people age 17-25 facing felony convictions in Supreme Court

• Preventing of young people age 17-25 going back to Rikers Island or prison

 

Across our youth services, Brightstar programs are guided by evidence-based principles including:

• Assess actuarial risk/needs

• Enhance intrinsic motivation

• Skill train with directed practice

• Increase positive reinforcement

• Engage ongoing support in natural communities -- Strengthen the influence of the pro-social community

• Provide measurement feedback

• Risk-need-responsivity

• Positive motivational feedback

 

Specific youth services offered through the programs linked below include:

• Using Cognitive Behavioral Techniques to Teach and Practice New Skills

• College Preparation and Career Exploration

• Case management

• Grace Alternative to Incarceration staff conduct regular school visits and accompany caretakers to parent- teacher conferences.

• Education and employment services

• Mentoring

• In-home family counseling

• Substance abuse testing and counseling

• Assistance with obtaining public benefits

• Linkages to a network of support and treatment providers across New York City



 

Passion Innovator engages youth involved in the juvenile court system. Grace Alternative to Incarceration will serve in part as a destination for young people who have completed their Family Court mandate in Grace Alternative to Incarceration’s Choices Alternative to Detention program. We will monitor the effects of Passion Chaser’s transitional services on long-term outcomes for Choices participants, and engagement in education.  

 

Passion Innovator is structured to provide the holistic services focusing on coordination with criminal justice agencies to help clients obey ongoing system requirements (e.g., parole or probation) and avoid further issues with the court system.

 

• services including family, housing, substance use, and employment services

• Crisis intervention

• Peer advocacy services

• Ongoing individual and group services

• Ongoing advocacy and support with managing requirements related to involvement in the criminal justice system