Established in 1992 by the Committee for Public Counsel Services of Massachusetts, the mission of the Youth Advocacy Project, now the state's Youth Advocacy Division is ”to protect and advance the legal and human rights of children, and to promote their healthy development through active partnerships with the community.”
YAP has had a dual identity as part of a state agency and as an associated nonprofit. In its nonprofit mode, YAP has attracted national attention for its unique blending of zealous legal advocacy with a holistic youth development approach to helping teens caught up in the courts and school discipline processes.
To further the mission, Youth Advocacy Project obtained a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to create a web-based information system to better organize their work and to support research and assessment by the criminal justice community. The grant brought together Database Designs with YAP leadership, as well as researchers from the Northeastern University’s Institute for Race and Justice. This team worked closely together to design a user-friendly web portal through which YAP service providers can gain easy access to newly organized and consolidated contact and program-oriented databases..
Legal and counseling staff have begun to use the initial release of the powerful web portal. The new web-based information system provides easy-to-use tools for detailed, team-oriented tracking of work with youthful clients over time and across multiple cases, as well as data exchange and integration with its legal case management system, CASEY. In order to ensure close integration with the rest of the statewide public defender web software, which Database Designs also created, we developed the new software using Microsoft .Net and SQL Server.
The software continues to be developed under the terms of the grant to allow sharing results, depersonalized data, and program theory elements with outside advisors and other practitioners in order to contribute to a national community practice in this field.
