Cost of Mentoring an at-risk teen
Hello. I have been on the web looking for some data about how much it really costs today, in 2009 to provide intensive one-on-one mentoring services for a teenager with about 6-10 contact hours monthly. The latest figures I found were about $1500 per youth. Some of the data is 10 years old. Any help greatly appreciated!--Kim Filla
I just posted about a new online tool for generating out of school time program cost estimates here: http://mentoringforums.nwrel.org/node/90
This tool might be helpful in answering program cost questions.
Michael,
I think your comments about cost variations, based on cost of space, and type of program, are accurate. This link points to charts showing our 2008 cost, which was about $155,000 for 75 kids. That does not include a share of fund raising and administrative costs, which would add another $40,000 to the total.
So it's about $200,000 for 75 teens, or about $2600 a teen. Browse the CC web site and you'll see loads of technology, arts, college and career activities, etc. which youth participate in along with the one-on-one mentoring.
We're in a high rent area of Chicago, and we need this space to stay close to our teens. A similar program in a different area, might operate in lower-cost space.
Our cost figures do not include the time of the 80-90 volunteers involved with the program each year.
There is a great chapter in the Handbook of Youth Mentoring on the cost of mentoring. There is a handy chart on p. 534 that summarizes various cost per match data from several prominent studies.
Traditional community one-on-one mentoring: range is $24/per youth per year to $2,447. One P/PV study put it at $2,289 when you include volunteer and donated services.
Group mentoring: $408 per youth per year.
School-based: $566 per youth per year (range was $19 to $2,875)
Hospital mentoring (career focus): about $3,000 per youth per year.
As you noted, some of this data is a little old. So I'd add about 10-20% to some of these numbers to account for inflation.
I think cost is really associated with the scope and specifics of the program services. If you are a faith-based program matching congregation members with youth in a church-owned facility and using church funds to pay for some match activities, that can be a fairly cheap program. If you are working with highly at-risk youth, providing intensive mentoring and access to other wrap-around services, and need to rent a physical space to operate in, your costs per youth per year could easily approach $10,000 when you add up everything.
Sorry for a mushy answer, but I've been asked this question a bunch over the years. All I can really tell folks is that a reasonable ballpark is somewhere between $1,000 and $5,000 per youth per year. Depends entirely on your access to in-kind people, space, and supplies (and whether you even count these in terms of total cost) and the intensity of the intervention.
Mike Garringer
Mentoring Forums Administrator
503-275-9747