Mentoring Research Partners Program: Evaluating Impact, Program Practices, and Implementation on High-Risk Youth

The purpose of the Mentoring Research Partners Program is to support partnerships between research organizations and OJJDP-funded mentoring programs for data collection and evaluation activities. This program furthers the Department’s mission by evaluating the implementation and impact of OJJDP-funded mentoring practices for youth at risk of delinquency and those who have experienced victimization or trauma.

The Mentoring Youth for Leadership (MYL) project aims to reduce the incidence of youth violence and delinquency and promote the positive development of high-risk youth. A primary strategy in targeting youth’s outcomes is to align agencies’ practices to those in the latest edition of MENTOR’s Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring (EEPM). Currently, the MYL project is evaluating youth outcomes per the requirements of their grant, calculating the number and percentage of youth who demonstrate improvement. While preliminary findings of the project include promising outcomes, more sophisticated, inferential analyses of outcomes and the role of changing program practices on outcomes are beyond the scope of the current project.

To address these limitations, the evaluation will build upon the current assessment and data collection efforts of the MYL program to include statistical analyses of the program’s outcomes and determine the effect size of the program on youth at high-risk for delinquent and/or violent behavior across multiple mentoring models. In addition, the evaluation will not only examine the role of changes to implementation of EEPM practices on youth and match outcomes, but also conduct a process evaluation of MYL’s project implementation in order to more fully understand the practical and psychological factors that may have promoted or inhibited programs’ ability to implement the EEPM benchmark practices. To date, there are no published reports of how mentoring programs change to better align their practices with the EEPM benchmarks.

Note: This project contains a research and/or development component, as defined in applicable law, and complies with Part 200 Uniform Requirements- 2 CFR 200.210(a)(14).

CA/NCF