New Look, New Board Members, New Ideas

The last year and a half has brought both challenges and opportunities to our field and our organization. For JSP, it has meant rethinking our approach to our services and our process. These considerations ultimately led us on a journey to revisit our brand and approach to engaging our clients and our community. Honest feedback from our friends and partners has been invaluable to JSP’s learning and growth, as one of our internal initiatives was to better understand the work we do through the lens of those who work directly with us. As a result, we’re happy to announce a fresh new look, new additions to JSP’s Board of Directors, and new ideas about system transformation.

NEW LOOK

As a team, we embarked on a complete organizational rebrand to better tell the story of our impact. To that end, JSP officially launched a new website this week, where you can experience JSP’s new look, explore our approach, and feel the impact of our work in a freshly redesigned online space. You can view the new site here. The site features our new logo and branding, which conveys the forward movement we are making alongside our partners in the mission to make criminal legal systems more equitable, effective, and humane.

NEW BOARD MEMBERS

Additionally, we have been joined by two new board members who have contributed to shaping JSP’s new direction and guiding values. Soledad McGrath is a Research Professor at Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research and the Executive Director of the Northwestern Neighborhood & Network Initiative (N3). “It’s an absolute pleasure to join JSP as a member of the board. This group is doing amazing work and to help guide this work is an honor and a wonderful opportunity.” Marcus Hodges is the Associate Director for the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency in Washington, D.C. and current Vice President of the American Probation and Parole Association. He has also served as President of the National Association of Probation Executives from 2014-2018, and assists in facilitating the American Probation/Parole Association of Leadership Academy. “I’ve always been drawn to people who do good and meaningful work and I’ve followed this team for many years…they are pioneers in their own lanes and they do great work in transforming justice systems.” Soledad and Marcus will assist JSP in actualizing our vision for helping systems improve equity and achieve better public safety outcomes.

JSP Board Chairperson Elyse Clawson shared her reflections on our new Board members:

NEW IDEAS

As part of a broader undertaking, the JSP team has engaged in honest dialogue around the work we do. This led us to revise our guiding values. Among these values are:

• the belief in the power of change.
• the importance of honest partnerships.
• and the need to advance equity across all the work we do.

Additionally, we’ve refined the way we describe our work while maintaining the essence of our processes. Our integrated approach to system transformation can be described in four phases: discover, analyze, innovate, and implement. Across all the work we do, we inspire clients to ask fundamental questions that get at the heart of public service, help them design methods for critical inquiry, support them in gathering essential data, and arrive, together, at creative solutions to improve the safety and wellbeing of the people in their communities.

Our internal dialogue has led to important new ideas about our approach to system transformation; and the dialogue continues as we design new ways to center the voices of those who are impacted by the system in the work we do. As a team, we believe the solutions to improving the safety and wellbeing of communities lie within the communities themselves—and we’re committed to an ongoing effort to ground our work in the communities we serve.

We hope you will share in our excitement around the progress we’ve made and anticipation of what’s to come. We walk courageously alongside you in challenging the status quo, and look forward to continuing to work together to operationalize meaningful change.