20160729-145550-72

CSG Justice Center staff visited Sponsors' adult reentry mentoring program serving men and women releasing to Lane County, Oregon from Oregon DOC prisons and Lane County jail. Sponsors mentoring program serves medium- to very high-risk men and women and has had particular success serving sex offenders (approximately 40% of their clients). Had the opportunity to tour some of Sponsors' residential facilities, including their standard transitional reentry housing facility for men, the "honors" block for men, their residential site for women and women with children, and to see the groundbreaking on the under-construction permanent housing that will be specific to sex offenders. Co-located with their men's housing facility is Sponsors' admin and operations departments, the mentoring program staff, two onsite probation officers, and an employment services center. Learned more about Sponsors mentor training and orientation materials, which are high quality and have attracted attention from other non-profits on the west coast who have actually contracted with Sponsors to do some TA on developing new reentry mentoring programs. Might be a sustainability opportunity to partially fund the program through consulting/TA contracts. Also spent a lot of time discussing Sponsors' extremely rigorous evaluation. They are working with two evaluators who have created policies and procedures to affect a true double blind randomized control trial. The resulting data set will be extremely rigorous and 'clean' if they're able to implement the evaluation as planned. It will be a useful evaluation of their mentoring program, but it might also live on as a valuable data set on reentry in Lane County overall. They're asking a lot of background questions so that they will have data on someone's life before incarceration, at the present, and up to a year in the future. It's been an arduous process for them to set up this evaluation, partially because it was much more expensive than they had budgeted for. The IRB process was also very demanding. Had the opportunity to meet with program staff, mentors, and mentees who shared their experiences, thoughts, and opinions about the mentoring program. They had universally positive things to say about the program and stated that they hoped it would continue to grow and that the rigorous evaluation would offer quantitative evidence of what they are able to see anecdotally about the positive impacts of reentry mentoring. Attended part of a 'basics of CBT' training that a Sponsors' staff person was putting on on-site for Sponsors staff, some volunteer mentors, and staff from partner organizations, including the head of parole and a judge. Trainings where partners and volunteers are included are common. They try to open training opportunities up as much as possible, which helps to sustain partnerships and facilitate communication and collaboration among partners. Heard an overview of Sponsors' organized pro-social activities that they do as groups or as mentor-mentee matches. They leverage their geographic location and do a lot of outdoor activities such as gardening and hikes. Mentees and mentors report that these activities help keep people engaged in programming while teaching pro-social skills. Long discussion on sustainability with ED Paul Solomon. They have diverse and creative strategies for sustaining their mentoring programming that include a variety of state, local, and federal funding, some fee for service, and private foundation funding and donations. Sustainability planning is a strength. Also expressed an interest in raising their national profile. They are already well-regarded in the state and even throughout the Pacific Northwest, but they hope to raise their profile even more, especially once the evaluation is complete. Closed out the site visit with a roundtable of stakeholders including corrections, parole, evaluators, and Lane Council of Governments.?