Closed: Mentoring for the Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative, Due June 15
"The SS/HS Initiative is a joint effort by the U.S. Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Justice to support schools and communities in creating safer and healthier learning environments. This solicitation invites current Safe Schools/Healthy Student grantees to develop proposals that will increase the capacity of their SS/HS collaborations to develop and implement community-based mentoring programs or to expand and enhance existing mentoring programs and strategies. This program advances the provision of integrated resources for prevention and early intervention services for children and youth by supporting effective evidence-based mentoring services to young people who are underserved. The intent of this program is to demonstrate new mentoring efforts or to expand existing mentoring efforts that work in concert with a grantee’s SS/HS comprehensive plan."
Due: June 15
Amount: One-time awards will be made for up to $300,000 for a 3-year award period. This amount is for the entire award period.
Eligibility: Eligibility is limited to current SS/HS Initiative grantees funded in fiscal years 2007, 2008, or 2009 and are in good standing with respect to those requirements associated with their Federal SS/HS award.
http://www07.grants.gov/search/search.do?&mode=VIEW&oppId=54182
Michael/Kay,
Do you have any information regarding effective, evidence-based youth mentoring programs? I have been doing some research on line and came upon "Across Ages"... have you had any experience with that program or do you have any recommendations for another program in that regard?
Thanks!
Lisa Twomey
Clayton Public School District, New Jersey
ltwomey@clayton.k12.nj.us
Hi Lisa,
I just thought I'd jump in and share the resources that we use. OJJDP Model Program's Guide (http://www.ojjdp.ncjrs.gov/programs/mpg.html) as well as SAMHSA's National Registry of Evidence based Programs and Practices (http://www.nrepp.samhsa.gov/). We are currently working with the SS/HS grant and our local evaluators insisted that evidence-based programs needed to be drawn from the NREPP.
Good luck! And let me know if you have any questions as this rfp furthers what we are doing already, albeit with a lot more funding opportunity!
I think "evidence-based practice" in the mentoring context is a pretty loose term. That could mean Big Brothers Big Sisters type community-based programming. It could mean something like Amachi. It could include other program "models," such as Across Ages or Sponsor a Scholar.
But it could also mean single evidence based practices from specific research. DuBois' meta-analysis pointed to many program factors that influence youth outcomes, such as training mentors. Rhodes and Grossman have research pointing to the importance of match length and relationship quality.
Heck, even something very broad like MENTOR's new Elements of Effective Practice could be taken as "evidence-based."
So I would encourage folks to focus less on trying to find an out-of-the- box model on the What Works site or on the SAMHSA site, and focus more on the broad indicators of a quality program. Best practices for recruitment, screening, matching, training, match support, etc. Build something within this guidance that works for your school and your youth (and your logic model).
A great starting point is the collection of resources, both ours and from other sources, found on our Mentoring Program Planning and Design Resources page.
Hi Guys,
Oops, just a mention that this was our caveat with the SS/HS evaluation team we are dealing with, not how we would define evidence based programs, but what they were interested in us using for their evaluation purposes. Full agreement with Mike and Kay!
What you might do Lisa is find a partner mentoring program, like BBBS in Vineland, to work with on the rfp. Good luck :)
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