National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program

DMT Helps the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program Change Young People’s Lives

DMT provides national-level training and technical assistance to the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program and has been a partner to the program for almost two decades. DMT was initially engaged in 1993 to design the program’s mentoring model and mentorship training. Mentoring is the linchpin strategy for transitioning ChalleNGe graduates into successful long-term placement—in higher education, a career, or military service. In that time, some of the outcomes we’ve helped the program achieve include:

• Enhanced staff retention and youth placement rates
• Mentoring program honored with two national awards
• Mentoring program boosted youth placement outcomes by 50%
• When staff is trained at recommended levels, program sites exceed graduation targets and yield a positive return on the federal and state government investment in program operations

White Paper: Youth Initiated Mentoring

Strengthening Communities Fund

DMT Helps Strengthen Communities, Nonprofits, and Faith-Based Initiatives

Faith-based and community organizations (FBCOs) have unique strengths—for example, the trust of their communities—that the government cannot replicate. Unfortunately, critical community needs can overwhelm the resources of many FBCOs. In 2002, the government established the Compassion Capital Fund (CCF) to increase these organizations’ scale and effectiveness. In 2009, the CCF program came to a close, passing the torch to the Strengthening Communities Fund (SCF), which helps organizations address the broad economic recovery issues present in their communities. During this transition, DMT helped ensure that no ground was lost. To keep all of the research and resources that had been developed for CCF intact, DMT created Strengthening Nonprofits: A Capacity Builder’s Resource Library, a free, publically available website that contains guidebooks and online trainings on a variety of topics relevant to nonprofits and community organizations.

In total, SCF-funded organizations increased the number of people they served by 60 percent.

Case Study: Managing a National Resource Center

White Paper: Breakthrough Performance: Results-Oriented Blended Learning

Amachi Mentoring Coalition Project

DMT And Amachi Help Improve Services for Youth and Families Impacted by Incarceration.

Public/Private Venture’s (P/PV) Amachi program is a unique partnership of secular and faith-based organizations working together to provide mentoring to children of incarcerated parents. In 2009, P/PV teamed with DMT to pursue funding from the Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) to document best practices in coalition development and replicate the Amachi model in thirty-eight states. P/PV and DMT also developed a tiered funding and technical assistance system, setting achievable service targets and providing tailored assistance to programs based on their organizational capacity, performance, and needs.

Our work with Amachi includes crafting an online learning community, intensive technical assistance to targeted programs, resource development, and webinars. Our highly rated webinars include information on sustainability, implementing program surveys, training mentors, and engaging mentees and caregivers—among other topics. Ultimately, our goal is to ensure the long-term sustainability of high-quality mentoring services across the country.

Big Brothers Big Sisters Lone Star

DMT Supports the Nation’s Largest Mentoring Program

Big Brothers Big Sisters Lone Star (BBBSLS) is the largest mentoring program in the country, with more than 10,000 mentoring matches. BBBSLS wanted to better target recruitment efforts to get higher-quality mentors and keep them engaged in mentoring relationships for longer periods of time. They reached out to DMT to evaluate their work with an eye toward replication and internal process improvement.

As part of this engagement, DMT conducted an extensive study for BBBSLS on mentor recruitment and retention. We analyzed professional market research and drove the design and distribution of a survey to more than 7,500 mentors within the Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston areas to improve program practices related to recruiting, screening, and retaining high-performing mentors. Additionally, DMT conducted an online survey on BBBSLS’ Match Support Specialists, or case managers, to gather 360-degree feedback on their performance. Beyond analyzing and producing survey results, DMT is providing BBBSLS with the tools and templates to replicate the process for future survey iterations.

Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program

Dare Mighty Things Supports Service Member Wellness

The Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program (YRRP) prepares service members and families for deployment, sustains families during deployment, and reintegrates service members with their families, communities, and employers upon release from active duty. DMT was tasked with developing standardized “toolkits” built from field-tested best practices at the national, state, and local levels. By identifying, distilling, developing, and distributing these practices to make them easily replicable and actionable, DMT is helping to ensure that service members receive consistent and extensive support—regardless of where they are located.

DMT also assisted with a National Guard initiative on Comprehensive Service Support (CSS), which included three additional key programs: Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve, Family Program, and the Psychological Health Program. CSS supports service members in all dimensions of health, including physical, mental, social, spiritual, and financial.

Joint Services Support Website

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

DMT Designs Dynamic Online Training for Mentors

In 2009 and 2010, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) awarded grants to more than 100 programs to focus mentoring efforts on reducing juvenile delinquency. To support mentoring programs, the agency established The Center for the Advancement of Mentoring (TCAM) as a central point for resources, training opportunities, and consultation to grantees. The Center for the Advancement of Mentoring is run through a partnership between Dare Mighty Things and the Education Development Center (EDC).

TCAM benefits from DMT’s extensive experience with mentoring programs applied in direct consultation with grantees, training delivery, and e-learning development. DMT provides direct support to thirty-two grantees, while a series of e-learning lessons are publically available to all OJJDP grantees, as well as the entire mentoring community. These e-learning lessons will be used to help support mentor training at hundreds of mentoring programs working to transform the lives of youth at risk for delinquency.