Partnership Resource Network
Project Name: What Works and for Whom? Identifying Effective Components of an Evidence-Based Mentoring Program for High-Risk Youth
Applicant: Pediatrics, University of Colorado Denver
Applicant Type: University
Application Number: 2012-50341-CO-JU
Funding Request: $297,774
Focus: Juveniles, Delinquency Prevention
Location: CO
Areas Covered: State of CO
Summary: Maltreated youth in foster care are at significant risk for delinquency, yet there are few programs that have demonstrated efficacy in preventing delinquency within this population. Findings from a NIH-funded randomized controlled trial (RCT) of the Fostering Healthy Futures (FHF) mentoring program demonstrate that FHF has a positive impact on the mental health, placement, and permanency outcomes of youth in foster care, but funding has not been available to evaluate program effects on delinquency or to analyze data collected about the quantity and quality of mentoring. Funding from OJJDP will enable us to collect data from the juvenile justice records of RCT participants and code, enter, and clean a wealth of data about participants’ mentoring experiences. Participants for the proposed study include 328 youth enrolled in the RCT who represent 92% of all eligible 9-11-year-old children placed in foster care in participating counties during 8 consecutive enrollment years. Study goals include: 1) determining whether FHF is effective in preventing delinquency, 2) identifying characteristics of effective mentoring, and 3) examining whether the impact of mentoring is stronger for children with high levels of baseline risk. Our findings and the proposed dissemination strategies will inform mentoring policy and practice.
March and April of 2012 were exciting months for the Fostering Healthy Futures (FHF) mentoring program. In early March, Pediatrics accepted a paper that describes the results of the FHF randomized controlled trial on placement and permanency outcomes; namely that youth who were randomized to the mentoring and skills group components of the program had fewer placement changes, were less likely to have been placed in a residential treatment center, and were more likely to have achieved permanency one-year post-intervention. The effects of the FHF program were most striking for those youth who started with higher levels of behavior problems (Taussig, Culhane, Garrido, & Knudtson, in press). In April, the California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare posted their review of mentoring programs (www.cebc4cw.org). The FHF program was rated as "Supported by Research Evidence" — no other mentoring program was rated as highly. Finally, on April 17, 2012, Bryan Samuels, the Commissioner of the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families listed FHF as one of the few evidence-based programs available for traumatized youth in his plenary address at the 18th National Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect.
We believe that mentoring holds promise as a delinquency prevention strategy for high-risk youth, but we need to make sure that our belief is supported by empirical evidence and we need to understand what about mentoring works and for whom. These questions have been identified in a recent meta-analysis as major gaps in our knowledge about mentoring (Dubois, Portillo, Rhodes, Silverthorn, & Valentine, 2011), and they are the focus of the proposed research, which builds upon a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of the Fostering Healthy Futures mentoring program (FHF).
Funding from this proposal will permit us to collect data from the juvenile justice records of youth who have participated in the RCT. Using data collected from justice records as well as self-, caregiver-, and teacher-report data con delinquency already collected during the RCT, OJJDP funding will permit us to evaluate the efficacy of the FHF mentoring program in reducing delinquency and juvenile justice involvement for a high risk sample of preadolescent youth in foster care. It will also permit us to code and analyze data that have already been collected from multiple informants (youth, mentors, mentors’ supervisors) about the quantity and quality of mentoring, in order to identify which characteristics of mentoring enhance program outcomes.
For Further Information:
Heather Taussig
Associate Professor
Anschutz Medical Campus
Bldg 500 Mail Stop F428
PO Box 6508
Aurora, CO 80045
heather.taussig@childrenscolorado.org
(303) 864-5216
Application Submitted in Response to Solicitation: Mentoring Best Practices Research
Grants.gov Assigned Number: OJJDP-2012-3204