I am W. Wilson Goode, Sr., Senior Advisor on Faith-Based Initiatives for Public/Private Ventures (P/PV). I come to this job after more than 35 years of active community and government service: I served for 10 years as the head of a local civic/neighborhood organization. I have also served as both Mayor and City Manager of Philadelphia. Most importantly, I have been a member of the same congregation for 47 years. So I come with a fair amount of experience.

I will not address in this testimony all aspects of S.304, but will focus on the charitable choice provision that will allow faith-based organizations to compete for government contracts to provide numerous services, including mentoring and drug treatment services.

Let me add that I know firsthand the value of faith-based institutions being allowed to compete for government contracts and services. From 1966 to 1978, I worked with 50 faith-based organizations that utilized various housing programs to construct over 2,000 housing units for low and moderate-income families. As Mayor of Philadelphia from 1984 to 1992, I allowed faith-based organizations to compete for various social service contracts. These faith-based groups received more than $40 million annually. I have now put all my experience to work in the area of faith-based initiatives. I have done so because I believe it is the best hope for solving many of the social problems facing our urban and rural areas.

This morning, I want to focus my comments on mentoring. Specifically, I want to talk about children whose parents are incarcerated, on probation or on parole. I believe these children are the most at-risk children in our country. Moreover, there are 2.2 million of them whose parents are in federal, state and local jails. If we add to this list those parents who are on probation or on parole, the number of children is over 20 million.

Through a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts and the William E. Simon Foundation, Public/Private Ventures has developed a model that we believe will respond to these children. Here is the model:

AMACHI MENTORING PROGRAM
By every measure, children of current and former prisoners are among the most severely at-risk children and youth, as they suffer from high rates of child abuse and neglect, illiteracy, drug and alcohol abuse, crime, violence, incarceration and premature death. Although there is no single approach to measurably improving the life prospects of these children, P/PV’s evaluation of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America (BBBSA) documented that having a mentor significantly reduces a young person’s initiation of drug and alcohol use, improves their school performance and attendance, reduces their incidences of violence, and improves their relationship with their custodial parent. Providing the children of incarcerated parents with this kind of support is the focus of the Amachi mentoring program. The goal is to involve consistently caring and supportive adults in the lives of prisoners’ children.

Amachi is a West African word meaning, "Who knows but what God has brought us through this child." It is our hope that this name will reflect the spirit of hope for children that will unify all of our partners, both secular and faith-based.

Amachi is a partnership of P/PV, the Big Brother Big Sister Association, local congregations and the Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Amachi Model
Volunteer mentors recruited by congregations will be matched with the children of current or former prisoners. The Amachi program offers three types of mentoring programs:
1. Community-based, one-to-one mentoring perfected by BBBSA over many years, which pairs one child with one mentor who meet weekly for at least one hour, choosing their own activities, schedule and location;
2. School-based, one-to-one mentoring, in which the pair meets at the child’s school at least one hour a week at a time cleared with school administrators, and engages in either recreational or educational activities; and
3. Church-based, one-to-one mentoring similar to school-based mentoring with the exception that the mentoring pair meets on church property rather than at the school. Big Brother Big Sister case managers screen the volunteers and provide case management and supervision for all of the matches.

In training volunteers, emphasis will be on the developmental approach identified in the P/PV study of BBBSA as more productive than a prescriptive approach that only offers youth such advice as "stop drugs" or "go to church." Instead, volunteers will be trained to focus on developing trust, engaging in enjoyable activities and waiting for the youth to ask the mentor for guidance.

Project Organization
Amachi staff are working with pastors to identify children of prisoners from their churches’ communities and with prison chaplains to solicit child information from prisoners. Both incarcerated parents and custodial parents are asked for permission to engage the children in the mentoring program.

At the same time, staff have identified 43 congregations that are willing and able to participate in mentoring. More than 550 mentoring volunteers have come from these churches. Additional congregations, representing all faiths, will be added in ensuing years.

The churches are organized into four clusters of 10 to 12 churches per cluster in Southwest Philadelphia, West Kensington, North Central Philadelphia and South Philadelphia. These areas were chosen because of the great number of children of incarcerated parents in these areas as well as P/PV staff’s familiarity with the congregations and neighborhoods.

One religious organization in each cluster has hired a Community Impact Director to manage the recruitment of volunteers, as well as volunteer pre-match training and post-match support. In turn, each of the 43 churches will designate a Church Coordinator, who will help mobilize and support the volunteers once they begin meeting with youth. Finally, each congregation will be responsible for maintaining at least 10 volunteer mentors in Amachi at all times. Continued participation in the project will be based on the cluster maintaining that number of volunteers.

As of today, 550 volunteers have been recruited from congregations located in the four selected Amachi neighborhoods and from one suburban congregation. To date, BBBS staff and volunteers have screened, trained and approved 542 of the 550 volunteers. These Amachi volunteers represent an 84% increase in the number of mentors involved with the local BBBS affiliate. Of the 542 volunteers, 363 are females and 179 are males. A concentrated effort has been underway since March to specifically recruit additional male mentors. Amachi staff have identified 800 children interested in having an Amachi mentor.

BBBS staff are currently engaged in an intensive effort to match children and volunteers. Two hundred fifty matches have been made to date, and the goal is to make 600 total matches by August 1, 2001.

As you can see, the Amachi program is working well. Already there are testimonies from children and mentors of lives being changed. I humbly urge you to support this effort and other faith-based efforts. Let me quickly mention one other program at Public/Private Ventures. Although it is not related directly to your Bill 304, it is indirectly related. Illiteracy keeps many children in darkness. Illiterate children and adults are at greater risk of committing crimes, selling drugs, and ending up in prison. The YET Center model could change much of that.

YET PROGRAM
In March 2000, Public/Private Ventures made grants to 21 faith-based organizations, representing a variety of settings from storefronts to large congregations, to develop literacy programs for those ages 4 to 24 years. The Youth Education for Tomorrow (YET) Centers are funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Annie E. Casey Foundation and currently serve approximately 600 young people.

Each YET Center operates four or five days each week with 90-minute daily sessions for those who are deficient in reading and language skills one to three years below grade level. Professional teachers are hired by the institutions and assisted by volunteers. The program consists of four parts: an oral language/vocabulary activity, a student writing activity, a basic reading program, concluding with an adult reading to the students from library-recommended books. All centers are using the model, and for the school-year programs that started in the fall, mid-year testing in January revealed that after only three and a half months students gained an average of almost one school year in reading achievement, with older students gaining several years. While testing, intake procedures and monitoring are new to these faith-based settings, all have been using the model.

SUMMARY
I appreciate the opportunity to testify on S.304 and to present you with a faith-based mentoring model for children of inmates, which has already resulted in measurable success. The fact that 250 children of inmates and volunteer mentors have been identified, trained, and matched in a short period of time (5 months) shows both the need for and willingness of faith-based organizations to be involved in the various drug treatment and prevention provisions that the charitable choice component of S.304, Drug Abuse Education, Prevention, and Treatment Act of 2001, seeks to provide. I have also noted the literacy model because there is a strong connection between illiteracy rates in children and subsequent drug use and crime.

Again, thank you for the opportunity to testify before you, and I wish you well in the passage of this important legislation.