RESTORATIVE JUSTICE AND VIOLENCE INTERVENTION
Salvation and Social Justice (SandSJ) is a nonpartisan black faith-rooted organization located in Trenton, New Jersey. They are one of the state’s leading policy and advocacy organizations addressing social and racial justice issues. Their advocacy has led to the statewide adoption of racial impact analysis for sentencing, voting rights restoration for people on probation and parole, independent prosecutor law and restricting solitary confinement. SandSJ was awarded a large grant from the New Jersey Office of Attorney General to create a community-based street team and a restorative justice hub that supports violence prevention and intervention on the frontline. Organization leaders knew they would need to build a technology infrastructure to help their new street team succeed and deliver their mission, so they submitted a proposal to Microsoft to develop a data-driven dashboard application. Microsoft Tech for Social Impact brought in Cloud Designated Microsoft Partner, Valorem Reply, to fine-tune requirements and develop the application. Valorem Reply built the Restorative Justice Violence Interruption App (RJVIA) to support the frontline staff, including outreach and safe passage workers, high-risk interventionists, project coordinators, and social workers, enabling them to accomplish their daily activities more effectively and efficiently.
The Restorative Justice and Violence Interruption app is literally at the crossroads of technology and saving people's lives. This application allows their interventionists out in the field to enter case information right in the field where they are working with people and get that information quickly organized, sorted, and reported while ensuring security over the sensitive information they collect. It is a great example of how cloud migration and optimization can help nonprofit organizations deliver their missions and do more with less.
Steve Cummings, VP Customer Success, Valorem Reply
We were really pleased Microsoft selected Valorem Reply to do the application development work. Steve and the Valorem Reply team were professional and great to work with. The team kept the project on schedule, and we were able to complete the development phase in three months. We also made sure that our street team was involved in the project at every step of the process. That's including the application design, requirements, development, testing, and we made sure that they were trained extensively on the application.
Retha Onitiri, Restorative Justice Fellow, Salvation and Social Justice
When it came time for modernization, The Salvation and Social Justice leadership understood the importance of not only building for the future, but also limiting the amount of churn and maybe wasted spend on ad hoc solutions that could only get them so far. Their investment will not only enable to take advantage of the scale and agility of the cloud but also more easily right size and deploy more resources to further their mission and impact in their community.
Steve Cummings, VP Customer Success, Valorem Reply
My advice to non-profit organizations is to use technology to work smarter rather than harder. Automate as much as you can versus using a lot of manual processes. Technology can help improve transparency, which is important because we exist for the purpose of helping communities and these communities want to know as much as possible about the work that we're doing. Technology enhances efficiency that can have a direct impact on how much our work in non-profit can achieve, considering the limited resources that we usually have. I highly recommend that non-profit leadership teams build a technology foundation and focus on building long-term solutions.
Retha Onitiri, Restorative Justice Fellow, Salvation and Social Justice
Challenges and Opportunities
- Need for a modern technology infrastructure to help SandSJ’s new street team and restorative justice hub succeed and deliver their mission.
- Intervention teams need a way to capture data quickly and easily on the streets of Trenton, NJ.
Solutions
- Create a data-driven application dashboard that supports violence prevention and intervention activities.
- Use data and technology to improve the operational effectiveness and efficiency of the SandSJ teams.
- Design, develop, gather requirements, and test a Dynamics 365 and PowerApps application.
Results
- Cloud-native application enabled frontline workers to communicate and collaborate via mobile devices with project coordinators and social workers to optimize their daily activities and amplify support of our communities.
- The RJVIA app uses visualization technology driven by data that is captured, normalized, analyzed, enriched, presented, and reported to support the team’s daily activities.
- Highly available and performant data solution to support the future needs of Salvation and Social Justice.