Friends for Youth Offered Matching Grant

If you knew your individual donation could actually be worth $25,000 to Friends for Youth, would you consider making a donation?

Friends for Youth has the opportunity to receive a matching grant from the Sobrato Family Foundation.  We must raise $25,000 in new or incremental funding from donors.  Upon achieving this goal, the Sobrato Family Foundation will donate an additional $25,000.

For 31 years we have served the at-risk youth in our community.  We know that our success in providing long-term, one-to-one mentors and activities to over 1,770 youth with a 90% success rate would not have been possible without the support of individuals like you.

We are grateful to the Sobrato Family Foundation for this opportunity and appreciate your support in helping us achieve our goal.

Recent findings about adolescent brain development explored at local conference

Friends for Youth was among those in attendance at the 13th Annual Northern California Tobacco, Alcohol, Drug, School Wellness & Youth Development Conference for Educators, held at U.C. Berkeley earlier this month, where conference keynote Ken Winters, Ph.D., explained emerging research about how the human brain is not fully developed until about age 25 and how this impacts adolescent choices.

“The teen brain is developing in a certain way that it likes excitement way above logic,” Winters said during his “This is Your Brain on Adolescence” presentation.

Winters also reviewed research on the effects of drug use on the developing brain, a very new area of science.

The conference included much information that can inform Friends for Youth’s work with youth, including the development of Life Skill Workshops for Senior and Junior Friends.

Other conference workshops included:
• Marijuana and Drug Prevention Strategies,
• The Body Positive: A New Look At Weight, Health and Self-esteem,
• Preventing Bullying and Creating Community, and
• Alcohol: Why We Drink and Why Teens & Young Adults Are More At Risk For Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Why It Matters To Link Research with Practice

I just heard that the Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring has received nearly three times as many practitioner applications for the number of spaces they have open for this July! It's exciting to hear the growing interest in research coming from the program side - from the growing trend of Evidence-Based Practices to the always important need to share results with funders, research can help improve policies and practices without agencies needing to try everything themselves. And it looks like research may be having an impact in looking at what works (or really, what gets funded) from federal monies.

Last week, I attended a fascinating Regional Listening Session in San Francisco sponsored by a collaborative of 12 federal agencies designed to gather input to inform the development of an overarching strategic plan for federal youth policy. Once there, they asked our group of about 40 attendees from various organizations and settings to answer the following questions:

1. What is the single most important thing we could do to make a difference in the lives of youth, related to positive youth development, youth engagement, youth enrichment, and youth mentoring?
2. What are the needs of youth (10 - 24 years old) related to positive youth development, youth engagement, youth enrichment, and youth mentoring?
3. What are effective programs and strategies regarding positive youth development, youth engagement, youth enrichment, and youth mentoring? Are there program or policy gaps?
4. Do specific populations of youth have disproportionately poorer outcomes related to topics we have addressed? What are some ways to best serve them?
5. What programs really make a difference in the lives of youth? How do you know this?
6. What are barriers to collaborating on youth outcomes and how can these barriers be removed?
7. What types of initiatives could promote collaboration and improve outcomes for youth?
8. What can be done for all youth (not just those directly benefiting from program) in order to use resources effectively?
9. What are your ideas for federal policy to improve coordination, effectiveness, and efficiency of programs affecting youth?

As you can imagine, there was a lot to say! I was heartened to hear so many attendees talk about the need for a caring and supportive adult in the lives of youth and how that single intervention can make so much of a difference. One attendee summed it up nicely: "I've never heard a young person say, 'That program made a difference in my life' - they always say, 'That person made a difference in my life.'"

In my responses, I was sure to emphasize quality, standards, screening, and the important link to research. I absolutely emphasized the existence of multiple published studies on youth mentoring in answer to #3 and, for the last question, the need to base RFPs with knowing what works from research.

A recent opinion from the Brookings Institution, Federal Programs for Youth: More of the Same Won't Work, argues for supporting programs with proven interventions at the highest level and less funding for strategies that have moderate or preliminary results with the promise of continued evaluation to decide if they would qualify for the top tier over time. Given the current economic climate and funding for social services either reduced or frozen, they argue that the best "alternative is to use rigorous evidence about 'what works' to evolve these federal efforts into truly effective programs, and to use simulation models, incorporating the best scientific findings, to trace their longer-term effects on participants' life prospects."

Mentoring practitioners know instinctively that mentoring "works." We also know that it doesn't work for every child or adolescent and it doesn't work with every mentor. From the programmatic side, we know as well that not just any program works. Recent efforts in Massachusetts and Minnesota are leading the way to implement the establishment of standards to "raise the quality of mentoring programs." Other statewide partnerships are in favor of "uniform, national standards to identify quality mentoring programs."

As long as these standards are exclusive enough to allow a wide variety of youth mentoring programs to be involved and inclusive enough to focus on the uniqueness of a mentoring relationship, the youth mentoring field - and youth mentees - will benefit greatly.

The Interagency Working Group on Youth Programs is seeking your input, too! Go to www.FindYouthInfo.gov and click on the Strategic Plan for Youth link on the right. You can enter your replies to the above questions there. They'll also be hosting seven other Listening Sessions around the country - San Francisco was the first - covering topics such as health and wellness, education, juvenile justice, safety, employment, and enrichment.

Opportunities to Improve Your Practice Through Research: 2010 Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring July 26-30, 2010

This July, for the fourth year in a row, Portland State University will host the Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring. Created by Thomas Keller, Ph.D., the Summer Institute offers a distinctive educational opportunity for experienced mentoring professionals. Participants attend an intensive week-long seminar presenting the latest developments in theory and research on youth mentoring. Sessions are led by prominent and internationally recognized research fellows. The aim is a series of highly interactive discussions that provide an in-depth view of the research and examine its implications for program policies and practices. The premise of the institute is that a sustained dialog between experienced professionals and researchers stimulates research with relevance to the field and enhances its translation to practical application.

Ideal participants are those who have several years of experience in the field of youth mentoring and are seeking an advanced level of professional development. They are experienced professionals who hold positions enabling them to influence the training and supervision of staff, the development of program models, and the implementation of service delivery changes based on the latest advances in the field. If you are in a position described here, I highly recommend that you apply – this is a truly unique opportunity for practitioners to interact and influence leading researchers in the youth mentoring field!

Applications are due this Friday, May 7th. To learn more about the Summer Institute and to apply, please visit: http://www.youthmentoring.ssw.pdx.edu/

Friends for Youth’s Mentoring Institute has been a participant at every SIYM so far – to get a real sense of what we learned, check out our summaries of these sessions on the Mentoring Institute section of our web site and click on the Connections newsletter links for Summer 2008 and Summer 2009.

See you in Portland this July!