This is a Department of Justice Initiative designed to "weed" out violent crime, drug use and gang activity from selected neighborhoods, while helping prevent crime from recurring by "seeding" these communities with a wide variety of resources, both public and private.

There are a total of 7 Weed & Seed neighborhoods in the City of St. Louis:

• Vandeventer
• Tower Grove East
• Gravois Park
• Fox Park
• Benton Park West
• Fountain Park
• Lewis Place

Seeding efforts have been broad-based:

• In the Vandeventer, Fox Park and Gravois Park neighborhoods, Weed & Seed Resident Advisory Councils have collaborated with local Sustainable Neighborhoods initiatives towards producing comprehensive housing, educational, economic, health and human service development plans.
• The Youth Employment program successfully placed 60 high school students in part-time jobs, many of whom have been with the program for 4 years now.
• The D.E.F.Y. (Drug Education For Youth) program, in its 3rd year of operation, graduated another class of 33 elementary school students from its educational, recreational and mentoring initiative.

Daily operations are carried out by an executive director who reports to four co-chairs: the Mayor of the City of St. Louis: the U. S. Attorney for Eastern District of Missouri; Chief of Police; and the Circuit Attorney.

The NST administers this grant, which funds several programs aimed at reducing recidivism rates among juvenile offenders.

Partners in the grant include the St. Louis Police Department, the Division of Juvenile Courts and the Division of Human Services.

Participation in the JAIBG funded programs is built into the juvenile's conditions of probation, thus allowing graduated sanctions for youth who do not comply with program requirements. Programs to which juveniles can be court ordered are:

• Life Skills/Conflict Resolution Training
• Juveniles and the Law (educates juveniles about the law and consequences)
• Night Watch (whereby Police and Deputy Juvenile Officers make home visits, spot checking juveniles for curfew compliance)
• Victim-Offender Mediation (in which the juvenile offender makes restitution with victims willing to participate in the process)