COCONINO COUNTY — Coconino County’s juvenile court services department’s development of the Hope Receiving Center earned a top honor in the 2024 Summit Awards a statewide competition of county governments conducted by the Arizona Association of Counties meant to recognize innovative problem-solving at the county level.
The Hope Receiving Center, developed by the Coconino County Juvenile Court, with participation from 12 community partners, was awarded a Summit Award in the Court Administration & Management category at the AACo Annual Conference last week. The project drew praise for its foresight in creating a space where at-risk youth as well as their parents and guardians can access services including formal deflection, truancy response, therapy dogs, and educational programming all designed to keep youth in school and stem the tide of juveniles entering the justice system.
“Coconino’s Juvenile Court Services project required a shift from doing things the way they had always been done,” said AACo Executive Director Jen Marson. “Prior to this program, youth were only able to access these kinds of services after they were already ‘in the system’ even though the goal is to keep them out of the system in the first place.”
The project relied largely on grants and the can-do spirit of the existing juvenile court staff who tackled everything from spatial design to drywall and artwork to make the space welcoming. In addition, the Hope Receiving Center is housed in two previously vacant detention pods which allowed the project to repurpose existing space without additional capitol expense to the county.
The judges were so impressed with the Hope Receiving Center that in addition to the Summit Award for Court Administration & Management, the Hope Center was also presented with a Merit Award for Innovation of the Year.
The center is open seven days a week from 7:00 AM to 9:00 PM and in the three years that it has been in operation, each year they have doubled the number of youth and families that they serve. In 2023, their deflection efforts serve 215 families and only1.86 percent of those youth coming back into the system. That means that 98% of the youth were successfully steered away from the juvenile justice system not only benefiting those children and their families directly but also saving taxpayer resources.