The SJI Board of Directors met on September 21, 2015, at the Supreme Court of Texas in Austin to make decisions on quarterly grant applications and awarded a total of ten (10) new grants.  The Board awarded a Strategic Initiatives Grant (SIG) to support the National Conservatorship Accounting Project.  Through this project, the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) will further expand conservator monitoring software first developed in Minnesota (also with SJI support).  The project will: 1) disseminate, adapt, and pilot conservatorship accounting software developed in Minnesota to three additional states; and 2) develop and test tools to identify problematic cases and direct critical resources to those cases.  As part of these efforts, the NCSC will convene a Conservatorship Accountability Project Network to encourage more states to adopt this software.  The Board also awarded a SIG to the NCSC to support the State Courts Election Law Resources project in preparation for the 2016 elections.  This project will result in an election law curriculum that each state can use to develop its own customized lesson plans; a series of on-demand webinars featuring prominent subject matter experts; and a resource toolkit on election law available to state court judges.

Six (6) Technical Assistance (TA) Grants were approved, including: assistance to the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Common Pleas Court for an operational review; a Family Law Unit Reengineering project in the Orange County, California, Superior Court; assistance to the Arkansas Administrative Office of the Courts for a statewide juvenile probation officer review; funding to the Fulton County, Georgia, Juvenile Court to support a project focusing on educational neglect cases; training tools for state court judges on Special Immigrant Juvenile Status provided by American University; and, a court consolidation impact assessment for the 25th District Court of Michigan.

Two (2) Curriculum Adaptation & Training (CAT) Grants were approved: support to the National Association of Women Judges (NAWJ) for judicial education on human trafficking issues, including a new focus on developing jurisdictional collaborative teams to address human trafficking; and the Kentucky Administrative Office of the Courts for an online pretrial services education program which will be made available to all state courts.