NCMI National Mentoring Initiative: Implementing innovative youth mentoring services in 10 sites across 6 regions with 7 additional capacity building and planning sites.

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's (OJJDP) National Mentoring Programs initiative is authorized by the statutes appropriating funds for fiscal year 2009. OJJDP made awards to applicants that proposed the enhancement or expansion of initiatives that will assist in the development and maturity of community programs to provide mentoring services to high-risk populations that are underserved due to location, shortage of mentors, special physical or mental challenges of the targeted population, or other analogous situations identified by the community in need of mentoring services.'

Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, Inc. (NCMI), is an intermediary for 178 non-profits (Compassionate Ministry Centers-CMCs) serving at-risk youth nationwide. NCMI seeks to expand an existing mentoring movement among CMCs to promote and institutionalize a wide range of mentoring best practices. The current total number of youth being mentored across the ten implementing sites is 758. NCMI seeks to double the number of mentors and mentees to be served by the participating CMCs across all six regions over three years. Ten 'implementing' CMCs will receive capacity building, training, technical assistance and funds to identify and implement best practices for the mentoring model and documentation of outcomes. Seven additional CMCs will receive planning, capacity building services, and funds to support technical assistance needs to select and implement best practices.

The goals of the project are as follows: (1) expand the capacity of seventeen mentoring sites to serve at risk youth by expanding their capacity to serve 50% more youth on average over three years; (2) increase the number of trained diverse mentors retained in the program for more than one year; (3) enhance the Comprehensive Supplemental Services and partnerships that support each of the seventeen mentoring sites by 25%; (4) demonstrate the impact of mentoring services on youth outcomes; and (5) strengthen the capacity of NMCI as a national intermediary to support the development and implementation of mentoring best practices across a network of 178 CMC. CA/NCF