AIM Juvenile Mentoring Initiative

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 this goal, OJJDP will provide grants to support mentoring and other transitional services essential to reintegrating juvenile offenders into their communities. The grants will be used to mentor juvenile offenders during confinement, through transition back to the community, and post-release; to provide transitional services to assist them in their reintegration into the community; and to support training in offender and victims issues. Targeted youth must be younger than 18 years old. The initiative's legislative authority is found in the Department of Justice Appropriations Act, 2010 (Pub. L. 111-117).

The AIM Second Chance Mentoring project proposes to expand an existing evidence-based mentoring program to provide mentoring and transitional services to an additional 225 youth. The target population will be youth ages 13-17 housed at Pendleton Juvenile Correctional maximum security facility and returning to Marion County. In 2009, Marion County ranked second highest in Indiana for number of youth returning from juvenile facilities and highest for number of new admissions. The overall goal of the project is to reduce the likelihood that youth are reincarcerated once they have successfully completed the reentry program. The youth will have an opportunity to receive services including mentoring, multi-systemic home-based therapy; life skill and socialization training; employment, educational and housing assistance; community-based referrals; and structured group activities for mentors and mentees. The organization will measure progress towards these goals by the number of mentors recruited, trained and retained; number of youth successfully matched in a one-on-one mentoring relationship; number of youth successfully completing program and tracking number of probation violations and reincarceration rates. CA/NCA