About Strategies for Youth
 Lisa H. Thurau, Esq.
Lisa H. Thurau, Esq. is a graduate of Barnard College and holds a Masters degree in Anthropology from Columbia University. She graduated from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University in 1991. Before becoming an attorney, Lisa worked as a researcher and advocate for reform and improvement of the public education system in New York City. She worked as an Associate in the litigation department of Coudert Brothers, an international law firm on copyright and commercial litigation matters.
From 1999 to 2008, Lisa served as policy specialist and then as Managing Director of the Juvenile Justice Center of Suffolk Law School. There, Lisa focused on public policy advocacy on behalf of court-involved teens. She monitored juveniles' civil rights issues regarding police treatment, tracked trends in the Center's cases, monitored and challenges legislation affecting youth in the juvenile justice system.
In 2004, Lisa initiated a training initiative with 180 officers in the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) Transit Police to improve police/youth interactions, to increase officers’ skills in working with youth, and to support officers’ development of innovative approaches to policing large groups of teens in public transit areas. She conducted a training over with 100 officers in Everett Police Department. Her assessment and training of 235 officers in Cambridge Police Department led to a reorganization of the way the Department provides services to youth.
Presently, Lisa is working with the Nantucket Police Department.
 Dr. Jeff Q. Bostic
Dr. Jeff Q. Bostic holds a medical degree from Texas University School of Medicine, and performed his residency at the Timberlawn Psychiatric Hospital. Dr. Bostic is the Director of the School Psychiatry Program for Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Bostic also served as Medical Director of the Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Project, in which psychiatrists were on call to assist pediatricians at the MGH site.
Dr. Bostic’s www.schoolpsychiatry.org website to advance service collaboration among clinicians, educators, and families for recognizing and working with children with behavioral and mental health issues in schools. To date, Dr. Bostic has served as a consulting psychiatrist to the Andover, Boston City-on-the-Hill Charter School, Lexington, Lowell, Silver Lake, Wellesley, Westwood, Winchester School District, Lowell School Districts.
Dr. Bostic has been a member of the Child Psychiatry Residency Training Committee for MGH and McLean Hospital since 1997. Dr. Bostic served as the training psychiatrist for the police training initiatives of Strategies for Youth with the MBTA Transit Police in Boston, the Cambridge Police Department, the Everett Police Department.
 Charisa A. Smith, Esq.
Charisa Smith, a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, has worked in juvenile justice for nearly eight years. Charisa formerly directed the Juvenile Justice Project at the Correctional Association of New York, where she coordinated the New York Juvenile Justice Coalition. Charisa continues to empower court-involved youth and families, to conduct media work and policy advocacy, to compose publications, and to write and deliver public presentations on a wide range of topics for the Community Justice Network for Youth of the W. Haywood Burns Institute. Charisa was a staff attorney in the Legal Aid Justice Center’s JustChildren Program through an Arthur Liman Public Interest Law Fellowship from Yale University. In that capacity, she represented incarcerated youth, conducted re-entry advocacy, and engaged in multi-faceted juvenile justice reform work in Virginia. Charisa Smith is a certified mediator and has received commendations for facilitating dispute resolution, and co-founded with her mother the New Jersey-based non-profit organization Cooperation for a Non-Violent Future, Inc. in 1992.
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