NIJ FY22 Youth Mentoring Research and Evaluation

OJP is committed to advancing work that promotes civil rights and racial equity, increases access to justice, supports crime victims and individuals impacted by the justice system, strengthens community safety and protects the public from crime and evolving threats, and builds trust between law enforcement and the community. Mentoring is a prominent strategy for delinquency prevention and victimization recovery that offers at-risk youth structured support from older or more experienced mentors to provide positive role models and promote resilience. With this solicitation, NIJ seeks applications for rigorous youth mentoring research and evaluation projects to address one or more of the following research priorities: (1) increasing the capacity for achieving broad, population-level impacts; (2) understanding how mentoring can advance change mechanisms promoting positive youth development; (3) examining program participation long-term effects; and (4) optimizing program effectiveness through iterative cycles of development paired with rigorous evaluation feedback. Applications proposing research involving partnerships with mentoring, juvenile justice, or other agencies, should include a strong letter of support, signed by an appropriate decision-making authority from each proposed, partnering agency. A letter of support should include the partnering agency’s acknowledgement that de-identified data derived from, provided to, or obtained through this project will be archived by the grant recipient with the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) at the conclusion of the award. Applicants and their potential partners are encouraged to review the NACJD’s policies and protections at (NACJD). If selected for award, grantees will be expected to have a formal agreement in place with partnering agencies by January 1, 2023. That formal agreement must include a provision to meet the data archiving requirements of the award. In the case of partnerships that will involve the use of federal award funds by multiple partnering agencies to carry out the proposed project, only one entity/partnering agency may be the applicant (as is the case with any application submitted in response to this solicitation); any others must be proposed as subrecipients.