Goals of Project
Co-led by Drs. Erin Godfrey, PhD and Shabnam Javdani, PhD, SAFE Spaces seeks to examine the substantial body of social scientific research attesting to inequalities across youth in the United States. This inequality manifests in areas such as educational attainment, academic achievement, health, and involvement in the juvenile justice system, among many others.
Too often, research questions emphasize the individuals that contribute to inequality, rather than focusing on the environments they inhabit. It is our opinion that systems and settings are key levers of youth development. Because of this, the settings that youth inhabit and engage with, such as schools, neighborhoods, or in the case of SAFE Spaces, non-secure placement sites for youth in the juvenile justice system, can act as places to address inequality. Thus, an intervention on a setting has the potential to benefit all the children who inhabit that particular environment.
The child welfare system, encompassing foster care and juvenile justice, is a particularly important setting for youth living in urban poverty. Recognizing the potential of the juvenile justice system to aid positive youth development, policy makers around the country are exploring innovative approaches to juvenile reform. The overall aim of SAFE Spaces is to examine the setting-level characteristics and processes that occur in child welfare settings and explore their association with outcomes for youth. As the first study of setting characteristics of child welfare settings, SAFE Spaces provides an important contribution to both the research and the policy/practice of communities.
To this end, SAFE Spaces is using a systems-level staff training intervention called Skills 4 Life (S4L). S4L is based on local and national needs to provide evidence based programming for youth in detention. We previously designed this skills-based, therapeutic intervention for incarcerated youth, currently implemented in partnership with the New York City Division of Youth and Family Justice. Indeed, the S4L intervention draws on existing literature and practice including Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Sociopolitical Development, and Trauma Informed Care, and aims to reduce recidivism by promoting behavioral, cognitive, and emotional skills with attention to youths’ oppressive social contexts. Incorporating a multi-level framework, the S4L curriculum encompasses three units: “Me”, promoting mindfulness and distress tolerance skills; “US”, promoting emotion regulation and interpersonal skills; and “WE”, promoting socio political awareness. S4L has been successfully piloted in youth detention centers in New York City, and is currently in it’s “X” year.
S4L will be evaluated as a staff-level intervention using randomized control design, comparing NSP staff who receive S4L, which implements the S4L program enhanced by a coaching program designed to provide monthly and as-needed support for staff wanting to implement the S4L training into their everyday job, to the control condition of receiving traditional training provided. The experimental and control conditions will be compared to one another on outcomes such as staff implementation and youth outcomes such as suicidality and Non-Suicidal Self Injury.
COVID UPDATE: With the spread of coronavirus, staff skills are needed now more than ever. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the RISE team has been developing a virtual systems-level training for frontline staff that uses the skills-based therapeutic intervention designed for SAFE Spaces as a foundation to help staff better cope with and manage the daily stressors of doing their everyday job during a global pandemic.
More information will be coming soon!
For more information about the SAFE Spaces project, please contact rise@nyu.edu.