Mentoring Today
WISH LIST: $100: 1 "survival kit" (food, toiletries, underwear, SmarTrip and calling cards); $500: activities for 1 mentoring pair for a year; $1000: advocacy and family engagement for 6 months of re-entry
When young people leave New Beginnings Youth Development Center -- which recently replaced the infamous Oak Hill facility, a place the Post called “a preparatory school for adult prison” -- most return to the neighborhoods where their problems began. Terrible poverty, high unemployment, and even higher dropout rates (45% for African American youth in DC; higher in Wards 7 and 8) mean trouble for returning youth. Mentoring Today reaches out to the older residents of New Beginnings, ages 16 to 21, most of whom have spent the better part of childhood and adolescence behind bars. Each youth is matched with a volunteer mentor who supports him during his stay in the juvenile facility and throughout his re-entry into the community. Staff attorneys work to resolve shortcomings in treatment or injustices in the detention system, and advocate for the resources that mentees will need when they are released: quality education programs, stable jobs, housing, and improved home lives. The recidivism rate for this population can reach 77%; at Mentoring Today it is 33%. What’s the alternative?
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