Juli Ana Grant is a senior policy advisor for the Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking (SMART) in the United States Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. She advises states and tribes on sex offender registration and notification and on matters related to sex offender management. Ms. Grant also leads the Tribal Training and Technical Assistance project that provides support and specialized training to tribes that are implementing sex offender registration programs and developing innovative ways to enhance community and registrar safety. In addition, Ms. Grant works on the Tribal Access Program, a collaborative project providing tribes with the ability to input critical biographic and biometric information on sex offenders to the National Crime Information Center. Prior to taking her position at SMART in 2010, Ms. Grant worked for the Department’s Office on Violence Against Women, providing support to state coalitions combating sexual and domestic violence.
Before joining the Department of Justice, Ms. Grant was a program manager in the Sex Offense Management and Domestic Violence Programs and the Tribal Justice Exchange Project at the Center for Court Innovation (CCI) in the state of New York. She managed development and implementation of sex offense management programs, specialized sex offense courts and domestic violence courts. She also developed collaborative projects, coordinated grant writing for innovative approaches, trained advocates and other professionals, and participated in countywide and statewide management committees. As part of the Tribal Justice Exchange Project team, Ms. Grant helped ensure tribal communities had access to training and ongoing technical assistance about problem-solving community-based practices, and encouraged formal collaborations between traditional tribal justice systems and state and local court systems. In addition, she provided technical assistance to states on domestic violence issues to help design and develop protocols, research projects, service plans, resources and techniques for documenting results.
Prior to her position at CCI, Ms. Grant was a director of Safe Horizon’s Brooklyn Criminal and Supreme Courts Programs and the Brooklyn Family Justice Center. In this capacity, Ms. Grant supervised staff providing crisis intervention and social services in the Brooklyn criminal courts, the King’s County District Attorney’s Office, the Red Hook Community Justice Center and the Family Justice Center. In addition, Ms. Grant oversaw the restitution program for victims of crime, as well as two child-care facilities that provided care for children with families involved in the criminal courts system. During her tenure, Ms. Grant expanded outreach to underserved communities and developed early intervention projects for domestic and sexual violence victims.
Ms. Grant began her career working in reproductive health. She then took a position at Legal Momentum working on judicial education around sexual violence and child sexual abuse. She was promoted to run Legal Momentum’s outreach program, providing resources and information to the public, which inspired her continued work on victims’ rights and services, offender accountability and how to make systems and courts be part of community safety solutions.