NIJ FY23 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, in collaboration with the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), NIJ seeks applications for rigorous youth mentoring research and independent evaluation projects that address one or both of the following two topical areas:

Barriers/impediments for youth involved in the justice system to access mentoring services.
Mentoring programs that serve youth involved in the justice system.

Applicants to this solicitation must submit proposals that address one or both of these two topical areas. No other applications will be considered.

NIJ will give special consideration to proposals with methods that include meaningful engagement with the people with lived experience of the subject of study; including, but not limited to, justice practitioners, community members, crime victims, service providers and individuals who have experienced justice system involvement.

Applicants are encouraged to propose multidisciplinary research teams to build on the complementary strengths of different methods and areas of subject matter expertise. NIJ also seeks proposals that include consideration and measurement of issues of diversity, discrimination, and bias across age, gender and gender identity, race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation, as applicable.

Applications proposing research involving partnerships with mentoring, juvenile justice, or other agencies, should include a 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 an award funded by NIJ 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 NIJ’s data archiving guidance. If selected for an award, grantees will be expected to have a formal agreement in place with partnering agencies by January 1, 2024. That formal agreement must include a provision to meet the data archiving requirements of the award.

NIJ seeks proposals that include robust, creative, and multi-pronged dissemination strategies that include strategic partnerships with organizations and associations that are best equipped to ensure that research findings lead to changes in policies and practices related to the subjects of study. Special consideration will be given to proposals that dedicate at least 15% of the requested project award funding toward implementing such strategies, as demonstrated in the Budget Worksheet and Budget Narrative.

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. The applicant is expected to conduct a majority of the work proposed.