International Justice

The Center for Justice Innovation works with justice innovators globally to support people-centered justice approaches.

We help plan, implement, and evaluate projects, collaboratively seeking solutions to justice challenges that transcend cultural and geographic boundaries. We aspire to build a global community of justice innovators that exchange ideas and practices.

Working around the Globe

Supporting people-centered justice innovations. We help justice innovators implement changes to make justice more accessible and equitable—seeking to demonstrate in all of our projects that justice can be shaped with and for the community.

• The Center’s work has sparked replications of our community justice initiatives in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Israel, and the Netherlands.
• Applying principles of the Center’s people-centered community court model, in Melbourne, Australia, the Neighbourhood Justice Centre has a localized focus and plays a proactive role in crime prevention, community education, and social reintegration. In 2017, the Center for Justice Innovation selected (NJC) in Melbourne, Australia, to serve as an international mentor court.
• The Center has partnered with USAID’s Justice Activity in Kosovo since 2021. Working with local legal and civil society organizations, we’ve helped improve procedural justice in courts, led training workshops, and shared capacity enhancement recommendations with the Free Legal Aid Agency. We facilitated virtual exchanges between Kosovo’s court teams and our community courts to share strategies for implementing people-centered approaches and drive innovation.
• In Moldova, the Center helped the Te Doy Foundation create an interdisciplinary approach to addressing domestic and gender-based violence and offered recommendations to improve service delivery for victims. This led to the development of a Family Justice Center that provides access to essential services, removing barriers between justice providers and communities.
  

Advancing justice through research. We conduct evaluations of justice initiatives, explore justice needs, and develop tools to support innovations among justice actors. 

• In Mexico, the Center worked in collaboration with the Executive Secretariat of the Organization of American States (SE-CICAD/OAS) on the expansion of Therapeutic Justice Programs in Mexico, which are an adaptation of drug treatment courts. The Center’s work included process evaluations of the programs, training and guidance on monitoring and evaluation best practices, and the development of data collection tools.
• In Colombia, the Center collaborated with SE-CICAD/OAS to develop and pilot a risk-need-responsivity tool aimed at informing judicial decision making, including identifying and addressing the needs of individuals involved in the criminal justice system through meaningful alternatives to incarceration.

In 2024, the Center worked hand-in-hand with justice reformers in Colombia and Mexico on these research projects. 

Sharing what we have learned. The Center has decades of experience practicing people centered approaches to meet people’s justice needs. We share what we have learned with justice innovators across the globe through training activities and site visits. Visitors can observe people-centered justice in action through our problem-solving courts, community safety initiatives, and collaborative efforts to address gender-based violence.

• In 2024, the Center hosted visitors from over 55 countries in partnership with the U.S. Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program, which connects global leaders with their U.S. peers to build professional relationships.
• The Center organizes multi-day learning exchanges for change-makers from around the world. Recently, delegations from Colombia and El Salvador visited our court and community programs to learn about problem-solving justice and explore ways to strengthen informal approaches like restorative justice, youth-led safety initiatives, and access to legal information through community volunteers.
• Every two years, we bring together passionate people dedicated to innovations in community justice at our  Community Justice conferences. At these learning exchanges, multidisciplinary teams and leaders of social change from around the world share new ways to build stronger ties between their local justice systems and their communities.
• We are also committed to shared learning between the US and UK, and work closely with the Centre for Justice Innovation, which seeks to introduce and support new ideas, new projects, and new practice in the British criminal justice system.