Alaska Tribal Court Support

The purpose of this award, funded under the OVC FY 2019 Field-Generated Program to Improve Services for Victims of Crime, will support an innovative, field-generated approach to address gaps in the availability of resources for crime victims. This award is made under Purpose Area 1: Innovative Programs to Fill Gaps in Tribal Crime Victim Services. Awards made under this purpose area will support broader programs that have the potential to impact victim services for multiple tribes.

The Alaska Native Justice Center (ANJC) will use this award to implement the Alaska Tribal Court Support project to serve the Anchorage Service Unit (ASU), a geographic area stretching 107,400 square miles across Southcentral Alaska from the Canadian border to the Aleutian Chain and Pribilof Islands that includes 55 rural villages federally recognized as Alaska Native tribes. The Alaska Tribal Court Support project will provide training and technical assistance that leverages existing tribally managed resources and support community asset mapping, in order to build the capacity of victim-centered tribal courts to deliver much-needed victim assistance to Alaska Native tribal members. The central gap addressed by the proposed project is the scarcity of training and technical assistance to support capacity building for tribally run, victim-centered restorative justice programs: therapeutic courts which take steps towards assuring the healing and safety of all parties impacted by a given crime, including secondary victims, who are often family members of the primary victim. The project will serve victims of all types of crime who seek justice through Alaska’s tribal courts, with particular emphasis on cases involving child welfare and the needs of victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.

CA/NCF