The Creative Connections Project

The Mentoring for Youth with Disabilities Initiative builds upon the foundation of evidence-based practices for effective mentoring and encourages communities to implement and enhance mentoring programs for youth with disabilities. These mentoring efforts will integrate best practices and proven principles into mentoring service models, including efforts to systematically recruit, train, and support mentors in their efforts to encourage individual youth to maximize personal strengths and to develop compensatory skills in specific areas of disability. This program authorized by the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011, Pub. L. 112-110.

The Creative Connections project, an innovative approach to serving at-risk urban youth with disabilities, creates and integrates a formal mentoring program into an existing arts based community program. Research has shown that participation in the arts provides an effective context through which to form relationships and provide mentoring for at-risk youth with disabilities. This project will provide an intensive intervention for 50 youth with disabilities. Through the project, partnerships will be strenghtened, mentors recruited/trained, mentoring provided, families provided resources, and the results evaluated.
CA/NCF