Opportunity INL-09-GR-04-EUR-02-17-2009

The summary for the Opportunity INL-09-GR-04-EUR-02-17-2009 grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affair, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

Opportunity INL-09-GR-04-EUR-02-17-2009: Executive Summary: Through this Request for Applications (RFA), the United States Government, represented by the Department of State's Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, Office of Asian, African and European Programs (INL/AAE), is pleased to announce an open competition for an assistance award with the Republic of Georgia as a target country for intervention of grant activities. INL/AAE invites U.S. non-profit/non-governmental qualified organizations actively operating in Georgia to submit proposals with a strong focus on advocacy for, and implementation of, legal socialization activities for Georgian juveniles. The total Grant award for one to four years will be up to $800,000 - with up to $200,000 per year funded annually. I. FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES DESCRIPTION Background According to the State Department's 2007 Human Rights Report, the Georgian government expressed a longstanding commitment to protecting children's rights and welfare, but it was neither able to allocate sufficient resources to create protective infrastructure nor able to introduce the necessary institutional reforms to fulfill this commitment. The Ministry of Education developed a program called "Safe Schools" in 2007 that included extra-curricular activities to keep children and youth off the streets, but this program has since been cut due to budget constraints. While infrastructure for prevention and protection may be lacking, punishment is not waning: the number of Georgian children prosecuted for juvenile offenses has increased by almost 50 percent since 2005 - mostly for petty theft, according to the United Nation's Children's Fund's 2007 Juvenile Justice Assessment. The report also states that over 37 percent of convicted juveniles ended up in prison, up from nearly 15 percent in 2000. Different research sources indicate that formal legal punishment as a sole or primary deterrent is ineffective, particularly among youth, and can lead to a high incidence of recidivism as opposed to rehabilitation. In order to bring about a decrease in juvenile crime among Georgian youth, a proactive and community-based approach must be sought. Child protection services and related specialists also need to adapt their conventional methods of case referral, control, treatment and justice processing. Georgia has neither juvenile courts nor juvenile judges and while official responsibility for juvenile crime prevention is in the hands of the patrol police, virtually no training is provided to them for their work in this area with juveniles. Experience shows that police can be an important resource in conveying critical knowledge and skills that are necessary for adolescents to become lawful citizens and can serve as community assets that help keep youth out of trouble. Police are also in a unique position to be positive resources to parents and communities through youth friendly activities that embrace prevention, corrective and reparative processes. This has not been the traditional role of policing in Georgia, however, which is further compounded by a legacy of mistrust by the public concerning policing and law enforcement in general. The Children's Rights Protection Center of the Tbilisi Municipality claims that the absence of juvenile crime prevention organizations is a major reason why crime rates have drastically risen. On the whole, youth protection within the post-Soviet structures in Georgia has not yet shifted from the conventional "deficit-based" approaches to youth-centered participatory and cooperative prevention. To create a new paradigm that is "asset based" in its approach requires an investment in non-traditional models that capitalize on the resources that community based law enforcement can bring to Georgian adolescents, parents, teachers and other professionals operating in child education and protection agencies, services and facilities. Program Objectives INL/AAE is currently seeking an organization with the requisite capability and experience to provide training and technical support to appropriate professional teams and Georgian communities in preventing juvenile delinquency and implementing legal socialization programs and activities for Georgian youth. To reduce the growing rates of juvenile delinquency in Georgia, INL encourages proposals that act simultaneously on many fronts with prioritized attention to the following key action areas: - Design and expand strategies that incorporate and support community policing as a juvenile justice approach. - Develop and implement prevention strategies involving law enforcement working with or in Georgian secondary schools. - Encourage peer-to-peer accountability and reinforce lessons of responsibility and community among teens. - Expand community-based alternative justice programs for youth by building on existing models. - Develop and adapt legal socialization strategies aimed at reducing juvenile crime in minority communities. - Design and provide cross-training for law enforcement and youth services professionals and implement collaborative intervention strategies to respond to first-time juvenile offenders. - Demonstrate key partnerships with lead governmental ministries, indigenous NGOs, community-based groups, and with private citizens who can provide resources and policy development leadership in developing and sustaining strategies for community based legal socialization programming for Georgian adolescents. - Demonstrate how proposed strategies build on existing alliances with police, judicial and other relevant structures for the sustainable adoption and expansion of the alternative juvenile justice best models and practices.