Cecil County Young Crime Victim Trauma Initiative

OVC’s mission is to enhance the Nation’s capacity to assist crime victims and provide leadership in changing attitudes, policies, and practices to promote justice and healing for all victims of crime. OVC achieves this mission, in part, by administering discretionary award programs supported by the federal Crime Victims Fund to develop innovative training and technical assistance, and to provide direct services to improve the overall quality of victim assistance. The purpose of the FY 2018 Enhancing Community Responses to the Opioid Crisis: Serving Our Youngest Crime Victims is to address an urgent gap in crime victim services related to the opioid epidemic and to expand upon existing or establish new programs to provide services to children and youth who are victimized as a result of the opioid crisis. The overarching goal of this program is to support children and youth who are crime victims as a result of the opioid crisis by providing direct services and support to these young victims at a community or jurisdictional level.

With this award, the Cecil County Maryland proposes to leverage close relationships with a wide variety of community partners to: continuously collect and assess indicator data, provide direct services to impacted youth, convene community forums to inform and train professionals and to promote community awareness, conduct monthly briefings for program partners, and share all available resources to meet the needs of this population. Funds will also be used to hire a part-time Project Coordinator, two licensed trained therapists to work solely with clients referred by the OVC program. CA/NCF