First Posted: 3/23/2015
LIMA — The term Sankofa, of African origin, means “looking back to move forward.”
The Allen County Juvenile Court received a grant from the Ohio Department of Youth Services to implement the teachings of the program to children who are at a moderate to high risk of reoffending in the community.
Sankofa focuses on cultural competencies and is listed on the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s national registry of evidence-based trainings.
The Sankofa initiative matched the initiative of the Allen County Juvenile Court, said Julie Norberg, chief probation officer with the Allen County Juvenile Court.
During the week of March 16, participants received training sessions that helped address the Disproportionate Minority Contact in the county.
DMC is a wide-ranging notion that minority youth are largely in contact with law enforcement and the court systems, creating an imbalance of their social interactions, said Berlin Carroll, court administrator with the Allen County Common Pleas Court, Juvenile Division.
The state will award counties to combat this problem through evidence-based training programs.
S. Jerome Addison, senior trainer with the Sankofa facilitator’s training course, said the program is a youth violence prevention curriculum, designed to offer youth healthier alternatives to their current life choices.
The program matches the mentality of the youth, said Tim Butorac, prevention specialist with the Allen County Juvenile Court.
“It gives them the wake-up call that there are alternatives to solving their problems with violence,” he said.
The training was a success in Allen County, Addison said.
The program was developed in response to a request for proposal from the Department of Health and Senior Services, to address minority youth violence, Addison said.
“The results have been very positive and favorable,” he said, noting that there has been a decrease in violence in those that have participated in the group youth intervention.
Though the program targets children from ages 13 to 17, Addison said the program has also reached youth in the sixth grade, about 10 to 11 years old.
