LifeWorks Named 2025 Innovative Impact Award Winner by Social Current

Social Current has selected LifeWorks as the 2025 Innovative Impact Award winner for its Travis County Transformation Project. Based in Austin, LifeWorks serves youth and young families—many of whom have experienced homelessness—through its housing, mental health, education, and workforce services.

The Travis County Transformation Project is a pre-arrest diversion program that deflects youth from juvenile justice into community-based respite services, case management, family counseling, and restorative healing circles to build well-being and prevent recidivism. The program is a partnership between LifeWorks, the Excellence Project, and the Travis County District Attorney’s Office. It specifically targets youth ages 15-16 who have been involved in physical conflict with caregivers, which is the most common reason youth end up in Travis County’s juvenile justice system.

Youth who agree to participate are never charged and do not touch any aspect of the traditional juvenile justice system. Instead, youth and their caregivers participate in holistic supportive services that help resolve underlying stressors that contribute to conflict, including housing instability and food insecurity, while building healthy conflict resolution skills and connecting to a broader network of community support.

“I am thrilled to recognize LifeWorks for their innovative efforts to provide community-based support as an alternative to juvenile justice involvement,” says Jody Levison-Johnson, president and CEO of Social Current. “Their results are inspiring—a testament to holistic and asset-based approaches, as well as community collaboration.”

In the first 18 months of operation, the Transformation project achieved an impressive 94% reduction in recidivism (3% for project participants compared to 49% of youth receiving traditional juvenile justice interventions). This program is an innovative approach that has been designed in collaboration with impacted youth and families to address their self-determined needs and goals. It combines the local expertise of LifeWorks and the Excellence Project with best practices from other justice diversion programs and a youth-specific adaptation of the evidence-based Circles of Peace restorative justice model.

Through additional collaboration with evaluators at The University of Texas at Austin and New York University Center for Violence and Recovery, they are documenting and evaluating approaches and producing materials for replication. The Transformation Project is actively seeking to expand its reach locally and to encourage replication in other communities.

Learn More at SPARK 2025

LifeWorks will be recognized at the SPARK 2025 conference, Oct. 20-21 in Chicago, and staff will share their expertise in a workshop about the project. Join their session to hear from LifeWorks, the Excellence Project, and the Travis County District Attorney.

Child, Family, and Community Well-Being is an area of focus for SPARK 2025 workshops. Other sessions in this focus area address building continuums of care to help youth succeed, using data to drive positive service outcomes, and cost-effective strategies for evaluation studies.

Register for SPARK 2025 by Sept. 20 to receive the early bird rate.