NORA Mentoring for Youth Affected by Opioid and Other Substance Misuse

JumpStart for a Better Tomorrow (JSBT) aims to extend its reach to middle school youth in grades 6–9 in Cuyahoga County, OH, with a special focus on the geographic region of Cleveland East: the City of East Cleveland, Euclid-Green, Glenville, and Collinwood-Nottingham. The tailored approach will benefit these communities, where nearly 100 percent of the target population lives in poverty. JSBT will enhance community capacity for mentorship programs through communitywide training initiatives. JSBT will target African Americans ages 11 to 14 who reside in Cleveland East communities. JSBT students attend schools with higher suspension and chronic absenteeism rates and experience a history of family substance abuse. JSBT will provide afterschool group mentoring sessions to middle school youth. In addition, JSBT will provide case management and wraparound support. JSBT aims to build resiliency skills that will carry youth through high school. The Northern Ohio Recovery Association (NORA) will expand JSBT to middle school students, expand community capacity by training local organizations to create in-house mentoring programs with the Botvin LifeSkills Training curriculum, and expand outreach by hosting events and activities for parents and interested community members. The goals of the program are to expand JSBT to one middle school serving 150 unduplicated youth and collaborate with NORA’s substance use treatment department to provide holistic treatment to youth with a substance use disorder, expand community outreach to parents and interested community members by hosting town halls and workshops to build parenting skills and strengthen family relationships, build resilience and improve decision making skills through structured afterschool programming utilizing evidence-based practices and mentoring, and expand community capacity through training and collaboration with local organizations. The expected outcomes are that by October 2027, at least 90 percent of the youth participants will demonstrate improved resilience and healthier decision making, reduce reports of substance use and delinquency among participants by 50 percent, and improve academic performance among 50 percent of participants by improving their grades by at least one letter grade in one core subject.