Posted by eporter on October 22, 2025
Mentoring Central Can Help You Craft a Winning Proposal for OJJDP Grants
The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) has released its funding opportunities for mentoring programs. Mentoring Central is here to help you increase your chances of receiving a grant award to support your program. Below, read more about OJJDP’s open funding opportunities and how Mentoring Central can support you with your application.
OJJDP FY25 Mentoring for Youth Affected by Opioid and Other Substance Use
Application due date: October 30, 2025
OJJDP has stated that this grant will “enhance and expand mentoring services for children and youth affected by opioids and other substance use, as well as their families.”2 The solicitation states that these grants can be used to fund mentoring services, and a small portion of funding may be used to support non-mentoring services related to substance use prevention, such as mental health treatment or substance use treatment.
Recipients of this grant are expected to provide training to mentors to teach them to recognize the signs of substance use in a person who is at risk for substance misuse. To strengthen your proposal for this grant, consider including Mentoring Central’s web-based, multimedia, interactive, pre-match training for mentors called Substance of Change: Building Assets in Mentees Affected by Substance Misuse in your plan. This training is based upon research and designed to help mentors not only understand the pathways to substance misuse, but also how to support positive growth in a mentee who misuses substances or is at risk for misusing substances.
To learn more about the Substance of Change eLearning course for mentors, click here.
For more information on this funding opportunity, click here.
OJJDP FY25 Multistate Mentoring Programs
Application due date: October 27, 2025
OJJDP has stated that this grant “supports the implementation and delivery of mentoring services to youth populations that are at risk or high risk for delinquency, victimization, and juvenile justice system involvement.”3 This grant is open to a variety of mentoring programs, but is designed to support programs that may be interested in expanding their mentoring program across multiple states.
Applicants of this funding opportunity must implement one or more enhancements to their existing mentoring program, such as training, new strategies for monitoring or supporting matches, or enhanced volunteer screening. Mentoring Central offers many resources that you could use to achieve these goals. You can write about these resources in your grant proposal to demonstrate your ability to immediately implement program enhancements that are worthy of funding. For example, Mentoring Central offers core, pre-match mentor training that you could plan to use with mentors to improve match outcomes. Building the Foundation for Mentors is our evidence-based mentor training that provides mentors with a solid foundation for the mentoring experience and has been shown to improve mentors’ readiness for the mentoring relationship. In addition, Mentoring Central can also help you customize our learning management software to help you achieve your program’s unique goals.
To learn more about our trainings for mentors and program staff, click here. To learn more about our services, contact us at MentoringCentral@irtinc.us.
For more information on this funding opportunity, click here.
OJJDP FY25 National Mentoring Programs
Application due date: November 3, 2025
OJJDP has stated that this grant will support “the implementation and delivery of mentoring services to youth that are at risk for juvenile delinquency, victimization, and juvenile justice system involvement.”1 This grant is designed to support mentoring programs with affiliates or sub-awardees across at least 45 states.
Recipients of this grant are required to implement one or more mentoring program enhancements as part of their project, such as providing high-quality training to mentors or implementing new strategies for monitoring and supporting matches. In addition, applicants must provide a description of the types of trainings mentors in their program will receive as part of their project. As an applicant of this grant, you can strengthen your proposal by writing about your plan to use one or more of Mentoring Central’s resources as a proposed enhancement to your program. Planning to join Mentoring Central’s membership program is a particularly strong choice for enhancing your program as a National Mentoring Programs recipient. Our membership programs include access to all of Mentoring Central’s evidence-based online trainings and instructional materials for facilitating in-person workshops.
The administration dashboard of Mentoring Central allows national mentoring programs to easily monitor the implementation and adherence to training requirements across their network of mentoring sites. In addition, Mentoring Central members receive access to our project management software system that can allow you to create and deploy surveys to monitor match progress and evaluate your program. The Mentoring Central membership is available in different packages with options for organizations of any size.
Learn more about Mentoring Central’s membership programs by clicking here or visiting mentoringcentral.net to learn more about individual products and services that could support your grant proposal.
For more information on this funding opportunity, click here.
Need help with grant writing?
We can provide you with brief written descriptions about Mentoring Central’s trainings or services that you can integrate into your grant proposal. Our training programs are empirically developed and studied, and our team can share our findings with you. You can describe the impact of our resources on mentoring programs and include it in your proposal to OJJDP to support your application.
If you would like for us to help you write about our products and services for your application, contact us at MentoringCentral@irtinc.us.