Atlanta GLOW LEAP OJJDP Multistate Mentoring Initiative

Atlanta Growing Leadership of Women, Inc. will expand its multipronged mentoring approach to help reroute, lead, and launch traditionally marginalized teen girls who are at risk for truancy, delinquency, victimization, and other negative outcomes toward lives filled with opportunities for skills development, upward mobility, civic engagement, and career advancement. The 3-year initiative, Leadership Education/Equity and Advancement Program will engage 700 low-income, minority, and/or disabled female youth (ages 14 to 17) in evidence-based mentoring, life skills training, financial literacy, and leadership development activities. Programming will be delivered utilizing a Positive Youth Development framework emphasizing strengths-based leadership, goal setting, resilience building, and civic engagement. Pathways to economic mobility with connections to community resources will further ensure youth and their families have access to eligible wraparound supports to improve their quality of life and life outcomes, and reduce their risk factors. The communities targeted for participation will be expanded from the current 29-county Metropolitan Statistical Area to all 60 counties in North Georgia, prioritizing Census Tracts identified as Designated Qualified Opportunity Zones by the Internal Revenue Service. This expansion will reach youth located in 40 percent of the state's 159 counties. Many families and youth in the target areas are at a heightened risk for negative outcomes (including truancy, dropout, gang affiliation, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, youth delinquency, and/or victimization) across several domains with characteristics that include lower education, economic, and employment outcomes, and higher rates of poverty, uninsured single-parent households, and language barriers. The program will facilitate eight cohorts of individual and group mentoring activities annually, with select youth advancing to participate in additional group-based leadership development and career exploration opportunities. Establishing and maintaining healthy, supportive, and meaningful relationships between youth and trusting adults is central to the project strategy; through these relationships, youth can learn to overcome stressors, navigate and resist social pressures, manage conflict and life challenges constructively, and remove the barriers that limit them from reaching their full potential.