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The Cook County State Attorneys’ Deferred Prosecution Program (DPP) is a pre-trial diversionary program that accepts first-time, non-violent defendants charged with a felony crime. The purpose of this paper is to document the development, implementation, and program patterns of the DPP to better understand the program’s scope and reach in diverting defendants from traditional criminal prosecution.

The approach to evaluating Cook County’s DPP is primarily qualitative. Through interviews with program administrators and current and former participants, the authors document the process of creating and implementing such DPP that aims to avoid a felony conviction altogether. The authors provide program participant patterns to shed light on the program’s scope and reach in diverting defendants from traditional felony prosecution.

Using data from staff, administrators, and program participants, the authors found that the DPP was developed and implemented through supportive leadership who instilled a culture of collaboration and buy-in. Expanding the program could include increasing the capacity of DPP to include additional participants or having a DPP incorporated into each branch court, instead of the centralized system under which it currently operates. Increasing the capacity and scope of the program could both further decrease criminal court caseloads and most importantly avoid a higher number of stigmatizing felony convictions for first-time non-violent defendants.

DPPs are cost effective and can be easily implemented within existing systems. Collaboration and buy-in from all stakeholders are crucial to the program’s success. DPP offers opportunities for expansion. Increasing the capacity and scope of the program could both further decrease criminal court caseloads and most importantly avoid a higher number of stigmatizing felony convictions for first-time non-violent felony defendants.

The main goals of DPP were two-fold. The first was to minimize the level of resources allocated for non-violent offenders in the criminal justice system by diverting such defendants out of the criminal justice system early in the process and reducing the recidivism rates of program participants. The second aimed to provide an option for eligible defendants to avoid a felony conviction, thereby avoiding the collateral consequences associating with a felony conviction.

This chapter documents how the process of grassroots community organizing through a family-focused model of local contestation liberates participants, mainly Black and immigrant Latina mothers in Chicago, from the constraints of individualization. While much philanthropic and academic interest focuses on the policy and quantitative “impacts” and “outcomes” of local social movements, the current study looks to local organizers to better understand their experiences and how they construct meaning through their participation. In-depth interviews and participant observations show how leaders gained collective purpose and voice through family-focused collective action. Community Organizing and Family Issues, a non-profit organizing institution, supported and propelled participants (leaders) to organize locally to create change in their communities, while it also facilitated conversions in self-perceptions. Leaders often discovered a sense of capacity, which contested gendered, raced, and classed oppression and self-doubt. Through the process of community organizing, leaders exercised power and dignity, facets that for the women in this study, were often ignored and devalued in society. These understudied social effects of collective action help us to better understand how marginalized women experience local social movements that cannot be quantified to fit narrow measures of movement “impacts” and “outcomes.”

This introduction provides the history and rationale for this volume on gender and practice. The editors’ broad conception of practice, especially gender practice, and the relationships among education, training, and practice, three sections into which the volume’s chapters are grouped, are outlined. Connections between gender practice and the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals are drawn. Each chapter is then summarized and relationships among them are highlighted.

Departing from an online interactive Gender Café on the topic of Knowledge Management (KM), jointly hosted by a UN agency and the Society of Gender Professionals, this chapter seeks to provide gender practitioners and others with practical examples of how to “gender” KM in international development. Through analyzing the travel of feminist ideas into the field of KM with inspiration from Barbara Czarniawska’s and Bernard Joerge’s (1996) theory of the travel of ideas, the chapter explores the spaces, limits, and future possibilities for the inclusion of feminist perspectives. The ideas and practical examples of how to do so provided in this chapter originated during the café, by the participants and panellists. The online Gender Café temporarily created a space for feminist perspectives. The data demonstrate how feminist perspectives were translated into issues of inclusion, the body, listening methodologies, practicing reflection, and the importance to one’s work of scrutinizing underlying values. However, for the feminist perspective to be given continuous space and material sustainability developing into an acknowledged part of KM, further actions are needed. The chapter also reflects on future assemblies of gender practitioners, gender scholars and activists, recognizing the struggles often faced by them. The chapter discusses strategies of how a collective organizing of “outside–inside” gender practitioners might push the internal work of implementing feminist perspectives forward.