Award Information
Description of original award (Fiscal Year 2010, $624,824)
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).
Big Brothers Big Sisters Columbia Northwest and the Oregon Youth Authority (OYA) plan to create a cross-system collaboration to facilitate successful and safe transition of youth offenders from correctional facilities to their communities. The program will supplement OYA's continuum of services: substance abuse treatment, cognitive-behavioral restructuring, gang intervention with evidence-based, one-to-one mentoring to incarcerated youth beginning 3-6 months prior to release and continuing after release until age 18. The applicant will serve incarcerated youth ages 12-17. The project goals are to develop long-term mentoring relationships with frequent contact to help them transition successfully into the community; receive mentoring and transitional services to assist with reintegration and avoid recidivism. Two hundred twenty-five mentors will be recruited and trained to serve 225 youth with evidence-based mentoring. As a result, youth will show 75% improvement in measures of developmental assets and 85% of enrolled youth will avoid recidivism. The organizations hope to increase the number of volunteers for mentoring and assist offenders transitioning back to their communities with enhanced cross-system collaboration to address the needs of youth offenders. This will allow offenders to avoid recidivism and enhance community safety. To evaluate the project, Youth Outcome Surveys will be utilized as well as Strength of Relationship and Customer Satisfaction Surveys, OYA data on recidivism, and project-specific measurements designed by an outside evaluator. CA/NCF