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Courtney Bryan
Courtney Bryan
A note from our CEO Courtney Bryan on the launch of Community Justice Solutions, our new venture to bring evidence-based innovations to courts and communities across the country.
My entire career has been built in and around the Center for Justice Innovation. It was the first place I worked out of college, and it’s been the home that I keep coming back to.
The reason for that is simple: We don’t just talk a big game. We innovate. We build. And we change systems to create a new status quo—one that’s fairer, safer, and more just for everyone.
That’s why I’m excited to announce our latest innovation, Community Justice Solutions—a national venture that will bring the best of our proven, on-the-ground innovations to the world. Led by a team of experienced problem-solvers, Community Justice Solutions helps communities build new responses to crime, violence, and system involvement.
Many of our ideas were radical when we first came up with them. But now they’re business as usual. Take the Midtown Community Justice Center, the country’s first community court and our very first project. It kickstarted a movement and answered some simple but neglected questions: why are people cycling through the court system, and how can we meet their needs while also making our communities safer?
From that initial concept, drug courts, mental health courts, and domestic violence courts have now become central to how New York State—and the nation—have delivered safety and justice.
In 2010, we piloted a new public health approach to reducing gun violence in just one neighborhood: Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Today, dozens of programs like ours exist and New York City is a national leader in this field.
And when we quarterbacked the Independent Rikers Commission in 2016, the idea of closing Rikers Island was an impossible dream. Today, closing Rikers is the law of the land.
All of those ideas were once pie in the sky. Now they’re so common that they’re almost boring.
We’re able to make these big, durable changes by staying nimble and delivering practical reforms that make a real difference. While our work on the ground is always changing to meet the evolving needs of our communities, the way we do that work remains consistent:
- We bring everyone to the table to figure out the challenges facing a community or system.
- We co-create new ideas with them.
- We use data and research to actually understand what works.
- And we partner with governments—in communities big and small, urban and rural—to weave these new ideas into the normal operations of the justice system.
We call this the “virtuous circle”—we learn, we build, we share, and then we do it all over again.
Ever since our founding, we’ve always sought to bring the best ideas we pilot in New York to the rest of the country—and learn what’s working across the country to bring it back here. From Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, from the state of Georgia to the nation of Georgia, courts and communities across the globe are building on the foundation we’ve created.
Led by an incredible team of passionate, driven justice leaders, Community Justice Solutions will carry that work forward to change the default setting on the justice system.
What does that look like? It means helping communities stop violence before it starts. It means helping renters and landlords solve disputes before families lose their homes. It means imagining new, restorative ways to address intimate partner violence and gun violence. And it means making every court a problem-solving court.
Building on decades of experience supporting reforms in all 50 states, we know that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. That’s why Community Justice Solutions helps each community identify its own goals and opportunities, bringing the right people together to build lasting change.
Communities around the country still want new ways to create safety and justice. Community Justice Solutions is here to build with them.