PACE Center for Girls values all girls and young women, believing each one deserves an opportunity to find her voice, achieve her potential and celebrate a life defined by responsibility, dignity, serenity and grace.
PACE is a Florida-based, nationally recognized not-for-profit organization that provides non-residential, prevention, intervention, and diversion services for at-risk girls and young women ages 12 to 17.
PACE provides girls and young women an opportunity for a better future through education, counseling, training and advocacy.
PACE uses a comprehensive and holistic model that integrates social services, education and career readiness in a safe, gender-responsive environment that reflects an understanding of the lives of girls and responds to their strengths and challenges.
The PACE model targets primary risk and protective factors supported by research that increase or decrease the likelihood of delinquency amongst girls.
PACE understands the relationships between victimization and female juvenile crime, and uses a strength-based approach that focuses on the unique potential of each girl, not on mistakes or poor choices she has made.
PACE Center for Girls is proposing to increase the academic success of girls that attend PACE by improving the gender-responsiveness and cultural competency of the academic instruction provided. To accomplish this goal, PACE will create a new gender-responsive curriculum, develop content delivery strategies for the teachers, provide training on use of the curriculum and the content delivery strategies, and evaluate the performance of the new teaching tools. The result will be a trauma-informed academic curriculum that will address the issues of academic performance outlined above.
The Chartrand’s investment in PACE Center for Girls reinforces the Foundation’s emphasis in creating positive reforms in education. PACE has a 25 year history of innovating in gender-responsive services and is recognized as a national model by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Children’s Defense Fund, National Mental Health Association, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Our partnership with the Chartrand Foundation will bring this level of innovation to gender-responsive education by supporting the development of a learning environment that improves the academic performance of girls facing significant risk factors and barriers to their success.
More than 30,000 girls are referred to Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice every year. (DJJ)
These girls share a common set of histories of emotional, physical and sexual victimization unstable family life, school failure, and mental health and substance abuse issues.
The documented link between victimization and female juvenile crime underscores the need for a gender-responsive approach to working with girls at-risk for juvenile justice involvement.
There are significant inconsistencies and inequitable implementation of existing juvenile justice policies that stack the deck against girls.
Incidents that were previously handled outside the system, such as family conflicts, are now leading to more arrests for girls than boys on charges of assault and battery.
To the world we are just girls, to PACE we are the world.
- Laura, PACE Alumnae
