The Name.Narrate.Navigate (NNN) Program: A Case Study of Tertiary Intervention for Justice-Involved Youth in Regional...

Name.Narrate.Navigate (NNN) is a trauma-informed program for justice-involved young people aged 12-18 years, recognising that experience and use of violence are often interconnected and may involve serious criminal behaviour, including vulnerability to criminal exploitation. NNN addresses a gap in evidence-based, culturally responsive tertiary interventions for this cohort in regional New South Wales (NSW), Australia, integrating dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) principles with Aboriginal ways of knowing and doing, co-designed through community-based participatory research (CBPR) with Aboriginal community members, young people, and frontline practitioners. The program aims to strengthen skills for self-awareness, self-regulation and healthy connection through relational, creative, and participatory approaches. Using a realist evaluation framework, this paper examines what works in NNN, for whom, and under what circumstances. Drawing on participant session ratings, practitioner observations, program documentation, and interviews, findings are organised across four domains: effects, mechanisms, moderators, and implementation. Indicative findings show that engagement, emerging changes in the narratives of self, and developing skills for self-regulation were most evident when trauma-informed and culturally safe practice was enacted within genuinely relational, strengths-based encounters. These conditions are identified and discussed as transferable principles for the field, key amongst them that intervention readiness must be treated as a capacity to be actively built rather than a precondition to be screened for; and that creative, participant-led methods represent an epistemological commitment to whose knowledge counts in practice. This case study contributes to a critically underserved evidence base by documenting not only what a tertiary youth violence intervention looks like, but the conditions under which it begins to work and for whom.