Youth Development: OST, Mentoring, & Education Equity

Amachi
Funder: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) 
Project Time Period: 2014-2018

Project Category: Youth Development/Mentoring/Formative evaluation

About Amachi: Amachi, under the stewardship of Dr. W. Wilson Goode, Sr., is a national mentoring program that seeks to prevent at-risk youth from becoming involved in the juvenile justice system, especially youth whose parents have been incarcerated or who have been impacted by incarceration. Since Amachi’s inception, more than 300,000 youth affected by incarceration have received focused mentoring through Amachi-modeled programs in 250 cities across the U.S. Experienced social service organizations implement the program; they recruit, screen, match, train, track and support Amachi mentors and identify youth who could benefit from the program.

The Work: Over the multi-year evaluation of Amachi, our research employed a multi-pronged mixed-methods approach—consisting of in-depth staff interviews, mentor surveys, and mentee pre/post surveys to better understand the implementation of the program’s research-based mentoring enhancements across the Amachi sites. 

What We Learned: Program staff and mentors’ perceptions of Amachi’s enhancements are positive, indicating they are helpful. Mentors are learning new information which is helping to enhance the relationships between the mentors and mentees. Additionally, mentees reported high-quality relationships with their mentors and are garnering benefits from their mentoring match such as feeling as though their mentors are someone they can talk to when they are having problems.

Download our report on the "Amachi Multi-State Grant (2014-2016)."