Blog: Funding

Thanks to Join Together, we've got information about two new grants available from the federal Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT): 

1. Family-Centered Substance Abuse Treatment Grants - These focus on treating adolescents in a holistic way. They are designed to "provide substance-abuse services to adolescents, their families/primary caregivers and older transition-age youth and where appropriate, any significant others/mentors or other appropriate adults." Grantees will be trained in and implement the Adolescent Community Reinforcement Approach (A-CRA) and the Assertive Continuing Care (ACC) protocol. Deadline April 24th.
2. Even more funds are available for the Offender Reentry Program grants, which seek to "expand and/or enhance substance abuse treatment and related recovery and reentry services to sentenced juvenile and adult offenders returning to the community from incarceration for criminal/juvenile offenses." Deadline May 21st.

Youth mentoring for teens in the justice system will get a huge boost, thanks to the stimulus plan. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) will be awarding $97.5 million (-!-) in  two categories. Info from the website: 
Recovery Act Local Youth Mentoring Initiative
In an effort to reduce juvenile delinquency, violence, gang participation, school failure, and drop-out rates, OJJDP is issuing this solicitation to support local organizations that develop, implement, or expand local mentoring programs leading to measurable, positive outcomes for at-risk youth.
Recovery Act National Youth Mentoring Programs
This solicitation invites applicants to propose initiatives ready for implementation that will assist in the development and maturity of community programs to provide mentoring services to populations that are underserved due to location, shortage of mentors, special physical or mental challenges of the targeted population, or other such situations identified by the community in need of mentoring services.
Applications are due April 20.

• As expected, R. Gil Kerlikowske has been officially named America's "Drug Czar", according to Join Together. While the former Seattle police chief seems to be a good choice, the "drug czar" positoin will no longer be part of the President's Cabinet. Though this might suggest that the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) will have reduced influence on policy, apparently Vice President Joe Biden will also be working on the issue. (See coverage in The New York Times and The Washington Post.)