Global Strategies for Implementation

Initiatives Underway
in Response to New Directions

New Directions is being used to enhance
victims' rights and services across the Nation.

The Office for Victims of Crime has received input from victim service providers and allied professionals across the Nation on how they are using New Directions to chart the future of victims' rights and services. The following overview provides some examples of the broad range of implementation efforts across the Nation to respond to the recommendations set forth in New Directions, and to utilize the vast resources contained within its pages:

• Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) will include a book review of New Directions in its special Millennium MADD ADVOCATE publication in January 2000. This special article, being sent to each of MADD's 500 chapters nationwide, provides an overview of the five global challenges of New Directions and encourages MADD's membership to take an activist role in implementing the recommendations—including the Report's first recommendation: the passage of a Federal constitutional amendment.
  
  
• The National Organization for Victim Assistance (NOVA) has highlighted New Directions at its annual North American Victim Assistance Conferences in both 1998 and 1999 by dedicating special New Directions plenary sessions. Leaders from the field debated and discussed the importance of this historic document, and challenged NOVA's membership to take decisive action to implement New Directions recommendations in their States and local communities.
  
  
• The National Association of Crime Victim Compensation Boards (NACVCB) conducted a special plenary session and breakout discussions on New Directions at their annual national conference in the fall of 1998. Discussions focused on reviewing the recommendations for crime victim compensation and discussing priorities for State program policy or legislative change. In addition, NACVCB also featured New Directions in the Association's national newsletter to its membership.
  
  
• New Directions has already found a home in the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board's recently revised law enforcement statewide training curriculum to include information contained in the Law Enforcement chapter of New Directions.
  
  
• Based upon many of the recommendations in New Directions, the Victim Services 2000 project in Medina, Ohio, a comprehensive, communitywide victim assistance initiative, has prioritized its missions and goals for victim services in the 21st century and has expanded its advisory board to include nontraditional victim service providers.
  
  
• Recognizing the wealth of information contained within New Directions, the Senior and Disabled Services Division of the Abuse Prevention Program in Salem, Oregon, has encouraged elder-issue multidisciplinary teams across the State to use New Directions as the central resource tool in defining and enhancing victim services to their elder client populations.
  
  
• The Wisconsin Department of Justice Training and Standards Bureau has placed several New Directions training recommendations before its Advisory Board for adoption into its current training curriculum.
  
  
• The South Bay Regional Public Safety Training Consortium in San Jose, California, has found New Directions to be a useful, comprehensive resource tool in curriculum development and in drafting speeches and press releases to increase public awareness about victim-related issues.
  
  
• The University of Texas at Austin and the Texas School of Social Work have applied the information contained in New Directions in two important ways to enhance the training of professionals who will come into contact with crime victims. First, in response to New Directions, both the University of Texas at Austin and NASW/Texas School of Social Work have included findings from New Directions in their respective educational curricula. Second, New Directions has been utilized as the primary resource guide for defining both schools' planning objectives, especially in the areas of education and mental health.
  
  
• Many agencies, organizations, and academic institutions are utilizing New Directions in curricula development. For example, the National Victim Assistance Academy relied extensively on the research, recommendations, and promising practices cited throughout New Directions in its comprehensive update of the Academy text in 1999. With the ability to access the contents of New Directions via the Internet, inclusion of this state-of-the-art information is readily available for academicians, policymakers, researchers, curriculum developers, and writers.
  
  
• The Texas Office of the Attorney General has assumed a primary role in implementing New Directions recommendations statewide. The Attorney General's State agency Task Force on Victim Services has adopted the field's recommendations set forth in Chapter Six of New Directions (Victim Assistance) as its road map for defining and implementing statewide victim services. Additionally, the Attorney General's Office is distributing New Directions statewide at State coalitions, conferences and other criminal justice working groups as the model for victim assistance in the 21st century.
  
  
• The State of Vermont is using New Directions to enact change and promote the need for comprehensive victim services statewide. First, hundreds of copies of New Directions have been distributed to criminal justice agencies statewide with a strong endorsement from the Vermont Victim Services 2000 initiative, a comprehensive, communitywide victim assistance project, to review, adopt, and replicate recommendations and strategies drawn from New Directions. Policymakers around the State have been sent copies of New Directions Bulletins to heighten their awareness of the need for the criminal and juvenile justice community to better respond to crime victims. Vermont Victim Services 2000 also has used New Directions as its primary planning tool to draft the Vermont Plan for Comprehensive Services to Victims of Crime.
  
  
• Strategies and recommendations found in the New Directions chapter on the Business Community are being used by Victim Services Agency in New York City to form critical partnerships between private business and public/private organizations to increase community efforts to assist crime victims.
  
  
• The Department of Criminology at California State University-Fresno is using New Directions as a textbook for its course on public policy and victims' rights in its Victims Services Summer Institute Certificate Program.
  
  
• New Directions is being offered by many victim services trainers across the Nation as a comprehensive, state-of-the-art, free resource for many diverse audiences.