Mentoring Program

Mentoring

Focus Forward’s mentoring program provides mentors year round to meet with youth weekly during their incarceration at the Juvenile Justice Campus and biweekly in the community during their reentry. The mentor's role is to be a trusted adult who is both a role model for the youth and a resource to navigate their journey through the juvenile justice system. Mentors include volunteers from the community, interns from varying programs at several colleges and universities and individuals with lived experience.

Utilizing the National Mentoring Toolkit (NMT) established by the National Mentoring Partnership, Focus Forward provides three of the five types of research based mentoring by utilizing community members, collegiate interns and volunteer at large who primarily meet with youth in one on one (traditional) sessions weekly. Mentoring is provided to youth on both sides of the campus (Commitment and Detention) and continues after youth are released from custody and reenter the community. 

Focus Forward Mentoring provides ongoing training to volunteer mentors to help assist them in the process of building healthy relationships with youth beginning with 20 hours of initial onboarding training before being eligible to match with a youth.

Volunteers also receive at least 4 hours of ongoing training monthly. Examples of trainings include but are not limited to: case management, mandated reporting, Motivational Interviewing, Trauma Informed Care and Adverse Child Experiences (ACES), gang awareness, substance use disorder awareness and relapse prevention.