OJJDP FY 2014 Practitioner-Researcher Partnership Mentoring Children of Incarcerated Parents Demonstration Program

For more information, click here: http://www.ojjdp.gov/grants/solicitations/FY2014/PartnershipMentoringCOIP.pdf

The President’s Initiative, My Brother’s Keeper, is a call to action to invest in collaborative, multi-disciplinary approaches to build ladders of opportunity and unlock the full potential of boys and young men of color. The U.S. Departement of Justice’s, Office of Justice Programs’, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s Practitioner-Researcher Partnership Mentoring Children of Incarcerated Parents Demonstration program responds to that call, and includes mentoring opportunities for young men and boys of color whose parents are incarcerated in order to build resilience, encourage empowerment, and facilitate community engagement and participation.

Overview

This demonstration program will support a practitioner-researcher partnership to develop and evaluate new mentoring practices to serve the needs of youth whose parents are incarcerated. Incarcerated parents and their children are a heterogeneous group, and associations between parental incarceration and developmental outcomes are complicated. However, research has shown that having an incarcerated parent can present individual and environmental risks for the child and increase the likelihood of negative outcomes.1 While mentoring has been shown to be an effective intervention for youth2, more research is needed to understand how the unique needs of youth who have incarcerated parents are best supported through mentoring. Under this demonstration program, practitioners and researchers must partner to enhance existing mentoring programs to serve children of incarcerated parents and evaluate the new approach. (The program development/implementation and evaluation will be funded as two separate awards under the corresponding categories described below.) The mentoring model that applicants will develop and test should enhance their existing mentoring services, incorporate changes to each of the eight elements of mentoring practice noted below, and be implemented across multiple sites. The evaluation should be a rigorous,  random assignment experimental design. This program is authorized pursuant to paragraph (2), under the Juvenile Justice heading, in the Department of Justice Appropriations Act, 2014, P.L. 113-67, 128 Stat. 5, 64.

Deadlines: Registration and Application

Applicants must register with Grants.gov prior to submitting an application. OJP encourages applicants to register several weeks before the application submission deadline. In addition, OJP urges applicants to submit applications 72 hours prior to the application due date. The deadline to apply for funding under this announcement is 11:59 p.m. eastern time on May 27, 2014.