In 2019, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ) received funding support from the State Justice Institute (SJI) to work with juvenile and family courts across the country to address the effects of opioid use disorders (OUDs) and other substance use disorders (SUDs) on children and families. The Children and Opioids in State Courts Project, a training and technical assistance project, provided national training on OUDs and other SUDs based on dedicated resource mapping along a SUD continuum of care tailored to site stakeholder groups.
The NCJFCJ selected 15 judicially-led site stakeholder groups to facilitate a process for targeted community mapping to build a substance use continuum of care, which includes identifying a range of local interventions and services around: prevention, treatment/intervention, harm reduction, reducing death and overdose, and recovery.
The NCJFCJ’s targeted resource mapping process helped the stakeholder groups:
- Map services that are currently available along a substance use continuum of care from prevention services through residential treatment;
- Consider developing interventions that may be viewed as controversial (e.g., needle exchanges);
- Develop a local resource directory that can be disseminated and used across systems; and
- Develop a sustainability plan to update the resource directory on an annual basis.
NCJFCJ staff collected key lessons learned throughout the facilitated mapping process so that future work can be improved upon.
This report includes lessons learned based on the challenges experienced and solutions used by the stakeholder groups during the targeted mapping process. The NCJFCJ considers the lessons learned throughout the project as recommendations for future stakeholder groups to follow when conducting targeted resource mapping around a continuum of care that can effectively address OUDs and other SUDs. Many of the lessons learned discussed below provided guidance for the structure of the Targeted Resource Mapping Toolkit.