This report provides an overview of the Office of Justice Programs’ development and implementation of its new mission, and its efforts to support community-driven solutions.
This report presents a look at the Office of Justice Programs (OJP), its past investments in criminal and juvenile justice systems with the goal of improving the fairness, effectiveness, and efficiency of those systems, and current efforts to revitalize and provide support for community-based organizations (CBOs). The document makes the case for communities as co-producers of safety and justice, emphasizes the importance of strengthening public safety infrastructure, and provides examples of the OJP mission in action. It highlights how the OJP is working to bring community voices into the decision-making process to shape federal policy and practice; it explores some examples of community initiatives which are funded by OJP grants as well as OJP investments in intermediary organizations that provide funding and technical assistance to grassroots CBOs that may lack the tools to apply for federal grant funds; it discusses President Biden’s Executive Order 13985 and the Department of Justice’s subsequent Equity Action Plan of 2022; it notes the complexities of the federal grant application process and describes OJP’s efforts to streamline the application process and remove some of the barriers to obtaining federal grant funding; and finally, the report examines OJP’s new orientation toward community inclusion in its scientific research projects to promote intentional engagement with the people who are closest to the issues being studied.