The City of Danville has been a catalyst for transformative change in its remarkable efforts to reimagine the City’s social, economic, and cultural future.
CYFA launched its BuildStrong Initiative in the City of Danville in August 2021 through the implementation of CYFA’s PEER and YPC programs and a collective impact model focused on youth opportunity and community safety. The partnership between CYFA and the City works to reinforces public-private collaboration to address the complex, adaptive issues facing the community.
Recognizing that society’s toughest social challenges are best addressed through meaningful cross-sector collaboration, CYFA’s BuildStrong Initiative focuses on developing a common vision for system excellence that promotes youth opportunity and amplifies community safety. In the City of Danville, CYFA is working with youth, families, community, and the City towards system transformation. This multi-phased adaptive, place-based strategy focuses on developing a common agenda through community and stakeholder engagement, developing shared goals through effective and equitable data collection, developing a joint strategic plan, and reporting on shared outcomes.
View the Danville Dashboard to learn more about the Initiative’s progress and milestones.
Danville’s youth are critical to the City’s future success. CYFA and the City have committed to implement PEER in the City to achieve accountability through empathy and compassion for people who have suffered harm. PEER advances the Danville Police Department’s (DPD) incredible efforts around community policing, and PEER provides an additional opportunity for DPD officers to stand as community partners rather than in a traditional adversarial role with children and youth. With PEER, community policing is advanced beyond engagement to systemic reform.
Who?
Available to young people ages 10 to 17 who have engaged in harmful behavior that would amount to a misdemeanor or nonviolent felony.
What?
Why?
Provides for meaningful accountability, is trauma- and victim-centered, and provides for successful community reintegration.
How?
Participation is entirely voluntary and it is victim-centered and driven. Admission of harm is required.
Youth Peer Court (YPC) offers young people who cause harm an opportunity to take actionable accountability through peer-driven dispositional opportunities that are based in restorative practice.
YPC empowers young people through a service-learning opportunity that amplifies accountability, cultural competence, empathy, and equity. It provides participants an opportunity to transform the current juvenile legal system from retributive to restorative. YPC Ambassadors receive instruction on the legal system and its processes, are trained in the PEER curriculum, and are mentored in the art of advocacy.
Who?
Available to young people ages 10 to 18 who have engaged in harmful behavior that would amount to a misdemeanor or nonviolent felony.
What?
Why?
Provides for meaningful accountability, is trauma- and victim-centered, and provides for successful community reintegration.
How?
YPC operates like a traditional court; however, the advocacy (prosecutor and defense attorney) and fact-finding (judge) roles are held by young people trained in CYFA’s comprehensive PEER curriculum and mentored by seasoned legal professionals. Participation is entirely voluntary. Admission of harm is required.
