Transforming Supervision with Women: The Gender Informed Policies and Practices Assessment - Community Version

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Alyssa Benedict has over 20 years of experience in justice and behavioral health and specializes in the design and implementation of gender responsive, trauma-informed, and culturally responsive policies and practices. She is the founder of CORE Associates, a psychology and justice consulting firm that provides training and technical assistance to government, private and non-profit organizations. Alyssa has served as a consultant and faculty member on various state and federal initiatives, and has also authored and co-authored various publications, models and tools designed to support practitioners, administrators, and policy makers in their efforts to implement gender responsive and trauma-informed approaches, and improve outcomes among women, girls, and staff throughout the justice continuum. These include comprehensive staff training curricula, organizational assessments designed to advance implementation of gender responsive and trauma-informed policies, and model approaches to building cultures of resilience and motivation. Alyssa has a sub-specialty in the neurobiology and ecology of trauma and resilience and co-authored Creating Regulation and Resilience (CR/2™), a gender responsive and trauma-informed staff communication model. She is co-chair of the APPA Women and Girls Committee, a founding partner of the National Resource Center for Justice Involved Women (NRCJIW), and co-founder of The Women’s Justice Institute (WJI).

Dr. Van Dieten is a registered clinical psychologist with more than 35 years of experience in program implementation, training, and the design of evidence-based interventions for correctional populations and staff. As a co-founder of Orbis Partners, she spent over twenty years working to develop gender-responsive interventions that have demonstrated positive outcomes in changing women's lives. She recently joined the Center for Effective Public Policy as a Senior Advisor and the Director of the National Resource Center of Justice Involved Women. Dr. Van Dieten is the author of several gender-responsive programs and publications, including Moving On, Living Safely and Without Violence, and the Creating Calm Workbook for Women. Through a cooperative agreement initiated in 2006 by the National Institute of Corrections, Dr. Van Dieten, was selected to work with a national team of experts to design, implement and evaluate the Collaborative Case Work with Women Model (CCW-W, formerly known as the Women Offender Case Management Model- WOCMM). She also worked with a team of scholars to develop the Gender-Informed Practices Assessment (GIPA). A number of state agencies have used the GIPA to successfully implement evidence-based policies and practices that align with the available research on justice involved women.