Grants awarded

Life Outside the Box crime prevention program         $100,000

Teachers and school liaison officers will empower middle-grade children in high-crime neighbourhoods to “think outside the box”: Creating comics, sharing stories, believing in a better future. The Life Outside the Box crime prevention workshop empowers at-risk middle-grade children to resist negative stereotypes, and avoid choosing negative crime-related activities. By addressing the root cause of despair that results from the stresses in living in high-crime, low-income neighbourhoods, this workshop corrects a major flaw of previous crime prevention programs that warned children to “just don’t commit crime” without addressing the root causes of crime-related behaviour. By encouraging children to tell their stories through creating comics and imaging a better future “outside the box” of crime, hate and violence, they will be empowered to think critically about their current situations and follow their dreams and make positive choices for their futures. I designed this project and was first author (with Tracy Campbell as second author) on the grant proposal for the Justice Institute of British Columbia. Grant proposal submitted to B.C. Civil Forfeitures, Nov 2013. Grant awarded on Mar 2015.

Missing Aboriginal Women Multi-Agency Response (MARS) course development.             $100,000

Service to and protection of sexually exploited vulnerable Women will be improved with the development of a Multi-Agency Response Simulation (MARS) course using the JIBC “PRAXIS” lab facility. Specifically, this course will help improve: (1) the identification that a woman working in the survival sex trade has gone missing; and (2) the speed with which that Missing Woman is officially reported through family, community and law enforcement networks; and (3) the efficiency with which Missing Women reports become active police investigations. Before law enforcement teams can successfully FIND a missing woman, first, they must know that she is MISSING. Sexually exploited women, who often lead transient lives away from their family, friends and home communities, lack the necessary network of people who might notice the Women have gone missing. Thus, the proposed missing women MARS course will help train professionals across B.C. to build better inter-agency networks that will shorten the time-critical lag in reporting and activating a missing person’s case. I designed this project and was first author (with Tracy Campbell as second author) on the grant proposal for the Justice Institute of British Columbia. Grant proposal submitted to B.C. Civil Forfeitures, Nov 2013. Grant awarded on Mar 2015.