Covenant House New Orleans Reentry Mentoring Program (RMP)

The Second Chance Act (P.L. 110-199) authorizes grants to government agencies and nonprofit groups to provide employment assistance, substance abuse treatment, housing, family programming, mentoring, victims support, and other services to help adult and juvenile ex-offenders make a successful transition from incarceration to the community. In support of the goals of the Second Chance Act, OJJDP will provide grants to support mentoring and other transitional services essential to reintegrating juvenile offenders into the community. The grants will be used for mentoring juvenile offenders during confinement, through transition back to the community, and post-release; transitional services to assist the reintegration of youth offenders into the community; and training in offender and victims issues. The legislative authority for this initiative can be found in the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 2002 and the Department of Justice Appropriations Act, 2009, Pub. L. 111-8.

Covenant House New Orleans (CHNO) has provided a full range of services to thousands of homeless, runaway, and high-risk youth in metropolitan New Orleans for 25 years. Many of the youth were already involved in the criminal justice system. This project will match 100 incarcerated juveniles with 100 volunteer mentors to establish meaningful relationships lasting 12-months across the pre and post release period. Mentoring will be augmented by direct youth placement into needed wrap-around services as a buffer against returning to former behaviors and subsequent re-incarceration. Youth ages 14 ' 18 incarcerated in a Louisiana prison, within 90 days of release and returning to New Orleans will be targeted. CHNO proposes untraditional multi-partnering with the Louisiana Office for Juvenile Justice, Tulane University, Metropolitan Human Services District, Reentry Benefiting Families, Aegis Systems and Kallisto Research Consulting. The goals of this initiative are to: increase capacity and coordination among service partners; individually match mentoring relationships; provide wraparound services for continuity of care pre and post release; provide resourceful staff, mentor, partner and youth trainings; and conduct an innovative evaluation to measure and report on project outcomes ' including a quasi-experimentally designed study with demographically matched juvenile case/controls to test intervention impact and quantify significant differences in 'type' of mentors utilized. CA/NCF