Mentoring Collaborative Coordinator for 5 county North Iowa area

OJJDP supports wide-ranging mentoring initiatives to reduce juvenile delinquency, gang involvement, academic failure, victimization, and school dropout rates. While mentoring is traditionally a volunteer-based service, a need exists for staff and resources to support the efforts of each mentoring program. Developing and maintaining mentoring partnerships and collaboratives can build capacity and increase the power of mentoring to benefit more young people. Local mentoring partnerships and collaboratives can bring together public and private sector leadership, eliminate duplication of efforts, fill service gaps, and offer centralized services. The successful award recipient(s) will fund a coordinator position to support a local continuum of mentoring services for targeted youth. This program is authorized by the Department of Justice Appropriations Act, 2012, Pub. L. No. 112-55, 125 Stat. 552, 617.

A mentoring collaborative coordinator for the North Iowa area will support collaborative building between public and private partners to enhance and expand critical components of local mentoring programs through the area. In addition to adhering to best practices of mentoring programs, the Guiding Good Choices evidence-based program will be used by the mentoring programs in the collaborative. Each local mentoring program will offer one-to-one, same gender matches with mentoring sessions focusing on positive youth development and risk referral indicators for each individual youth. All participants are expected to meet four hours each month for one school year and over the summer in the case of community-based matches.

The Mentoring Collaborative Coordinator (MCC) will conduct a base-line inventory of active partners for each program at the start of the grant. New partners will be reported via the web based system. The primary objective is to improve the outcomes for 152 at-risk youth, age 11-15, in mentoring programs by establishing and strengthening collaborative community approaches by September 2014. The Mentoring Collaborative Coordinator (MCC) will conduct a base-line assessment of all Iowa Mentoring Partnership certification requirements to identify areas for improvement within the individual programs. An action plan will be developed by the local program and the MCC to improve program quality. All mentoring programs initiated during this grant will become certified with the Iowa Mentoring Partnership. Local programs will report their improvement progress via the web based system.

CA/NCF