Reentry Task Force Meeting
The Statewide Reentry Task Force will hold its second meeting on Tuesday, April 20, 2010, at 9:00 a.m. at the Robert Moreton Building, located at 1100 West 49th Street, Austin, TX 78756in Board Room/M-739. Meeting is opened to the public!
Click here to see agenda.
Click here to see directions to the meeting.
Reentry Task Force
We are pleased to have been a participant in the Reentry Task Force’s successful first meeting held last month. To view PowerPoint presentations given during the Task Force meeting by TDCJ Deputy Executive Director Bryan Collier and Becki Ney and Richard Stroker from the National Institute on Corrections (NIC), click here.
Note: TDCJ is in the process of preparing an application for the Second Chance Act, due March 4th, which could provide the state with federal funding for reentry initiatives. To stay up to date on reentry related information, including reports, articles, and conference information, visit the Reentry and Integration website. http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/rid/rid-home.html
Also, a new hotline has been established to address the questions, needs, and/or concerns of recently released individuals, their family members, and members of the general public. Call 1-877-887-6151 for more information. The Community Problem-Solving Project through Massechusettes Institute of Technology provides an excellent model for community planners to utilize as they create community re-entry plans. The users of this site work in all three sectors - public, non-profit (or non-governmental), and private - and across them. The Strategy Tools section includes the following tools created by Xavier de Sousa-Briggs:
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Organizing and Agenda Setting: This provides tools for bringing people together to effect change, picking issues effectively and getting them "on the radar screen" for the attention of others, turning "concern" into organized action, and identifying those with a stake in the issues (stakeholders), while building will and capacity for change.
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Planning: This provides tools for planning given a set of identified problems or concerns, working with others to understand conditions and causes, generating possible solutions or options, and making decisions among the options.
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Implementing Together (Co-Producing Solutions): This provides tools for implementing community projects when given a mandate, as well as some promising options for producing the needed results (more and more often through joint arrangements among stakeholders).
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Learning Together and Managing Knowledge: This section gets players that are working together to learn more about the problems (especially when they don't see things the same way), about each other's interests, about what types of solutions or responses to problems are promising and why, and about what the barriers to action (including the players' own resistance) may be.
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Negotiation, Mediation, and Consensus-Building: This section works to advance your interests (or those of your constituents) in a world in which more and more issues that matter are jointly decided with other players, rather than imposed "top-down" from above. It discusses how to manage conflict to get key decisions made legitimately and wisely. It also addresses how to deal with unequal power and gain more leverage.