MENTORING PROGRAM GOALS

The FRIENDS FIRST Mentoring Program is designed to provide ongoing support to teens who have chosen (or simply want to learn more about) abstinence from high-risk behaviors including premarital sexual involvement, tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs. It is a cascading mentoring model. The mentoring program can work successfully with students from the 5th to 12th grades. The goals of the program are as follows:

• To provide mentoring relationships between older and younger youth.
• To provide alternatives to high-risk behavior by sponsoring risk-free activities to youth at equal intervals throughout the year, especially after school, weekends, and school vacations.
• To increase assets in the lives of youth.
• To provide ongoing abstinence skills training and relationship education workshops.
• To promote healthy passages to youth during high-risk transitional periods from elementary school to middle school and middle school to high school.
• To engage and educate parents to become the primary sexuality educators of their children and to teach their children to effectively communicate boundaries.
• To develop the inner character of youth to make abstinence from risky behavior a truly viable alternative.
• To provide updated information and education about the epidemic rates of teen pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections, and out-of-wedlock births.
• To develop the foundation of skills necessary and conducive to stable, successful, long-term, monogamous marriage relationships.
• To increase protective factors found to be effective in reducing out-of-wedlock child bearing and risk behaviors.