Our Expertise

PRA’s expertise spans a wide range of foremost concerns impacting communities and marginalized populations. Our staff of seasoned subject-matter experts draws on extensive professional and lived experience to address the key topics at the core of our work.

• Behavioral Health: Behavioral health has always been a primary focus of PRA’s work. Through our technical assistance, facilitation, and evaluation services, we help jurisdictions develop partnerships between behavioral health, justice, education, child welfare, and health to build a seamless system of care.
• Homelessness: PRA is dedicated to addressing the complex housing and health needs of people experiencing or at risk of homelessness. Our work is grounded in evidence-based practices that contribute to housing stability, recovery, and an end to homelessness.
• Income Supports: Our work focuses on increasing access to employment and mainstream resources, including Social Security disability benefits and Medicaid and Medicare health coverage, for eligible adults and youth with serious mental illness, medical impairments, or co-occurring substance use disorders.
• Criminal Justice: A cornerstone of our work is transforming criminal justice systems to improve public safety and public health outcomes for people with behavioral health needs. We work with localities, regions, states, and at the national level across a wide array of issues to influence criminal justice and behavioral health policy and practice change.
• Juvenile Justice: Our focus on juvenile justice helps jurisdictions craft developmentally appropriate interventions that serve the behavioral health needs of youth in contact with the juvenile justice system.
• Service Members, Veterans, and Their Families: We enhance care for service members, Veterans, and their families (SMVF) by strengthening behavioral health systems through interagency collaboration and the implementation of evidence-based and promising practices.
• Recovery Supports: We work with agencies and jurisdictions to enhance the coordination of recovery services. Our work promotes the integration of individuals with lived experience, person-centered recovery planning, and trauma-informed care.
• Consumers and Family Members: To promote long-lasting and effective systems change, we encourage organizations to integrate consumers and families with lived experience into organizational and initiative planning.
• Trauma: We help stakeholders recognize the impact of trauma on behavior and develop trauma-informed approaches that can be integrated into their organizations, with a critical focus on behavioral health and criminal justice organizations to promote healing and recovery.
• Wellness: Our well-being and wellness work improves outcomes for people with behavioral health conditions. Through our work, we encourage agencies and jurisdictions to incorporate well-being into recovery services for individuals, families, and communities to create holistic systems of care.
• Education: PRA’s focus on education revolves around building the structure that students need to succeed in school. We work with schools to build partnerships with behavioral health providers and families to ensure that youth receive the right services at the right time.
• Systems Mapping: Systems mapping is a core piece of PRA’s work across our areas of expertise. Using a framework, such as the Sequential Intercept Model, the Critical Intervention Model for Youth, or the Crisis Intercept Model, we walk jurisdictions through how people flow from the community into the criminal justice, juvenile justice, or crisis systems and identify key intercept points of diversion and treatment.