The Executive Office of the President, Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), and the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) are accepting applications for fiscal year (FY)
2010 Drug Free Communities Mentoring Program (DFC Mentoring) grants.
The purpose of the DFC Mentoring Program is to provide grant funds to existing DFC grantees, so that they may serve as Mentors to newly-formed and/or developing coalitions that have never received a DFC grant.
DFC is a collaborative initiative sponsored by ONDCP in partnership with SAMHSA in order to achieve two major goals:
* Establish and strengthen collaboration among communities, public and private nonprofit agencies, and Federal, State, local, and tribal governments to support the efforts of community coalitions to prevent and reduce substance use among youth.
For the purposes of this RFA, youth is defined as individuals 18 years of age and younger.
* Reduce substance use among youth and, over time, among adults by addressing the factors in a community that increase the risk of substance abuse and promoting the factors that minimize the risk of substance abuse.
(Substances include, but are not limited to narcotics, depressants, stimulants, hallucinogens, inhalants, marijuana, alcohol, and tobacco, where their use is prohibited by Federal, State, or local law.) Note:
DFC projects must focus on multiple drugs of abuse.
When the term drug or substance is used in this funding announcement, it is intended to include all of the above drugs.
Mentoring grant funds must be used by the Mentor coalition (grantee) for the direct benefit of the Mentee community/coalition.
Funding through this grant should support access for the Mentee community/coalition to obtain the training and technical assistance necessary to help them form a community coalition and pursue a DFC Support Program grant.
In addition, the Mentor coalition must establish a mentoring plan that not only includes training and technical assistance for the Mentee community/coalition, but also assists the new coalition in moving toward being an effective entity capable of addressing youth substance use.
It is the intent of the DFC Mentoring Program that communities mentored through this effort will form functioning coalitions working to reduce youth drug use at the community level, and that those coalitions should meet the basic eligibility criteria (Part III) of the DFC program.
By the end of the two-year grant period, Mentor coalitions should have fully prepared each Mentee community/coalition to effectively compete for their own DFC grants.
The Drug Free Communities Program (DFC) was created by the Drug Free Communities Act, 1997 (Public Law 105-20).
DFC Mentoring grants were established as a component of the DFC Program when the DFC Program was reauthorized on December 14, 2001 (Public Law 107-82, 115 Stat.
814).
Congress again demonstrated its support for the DFC Mentoring effort when the DFC Program and the DFC Mentoring Program were reauthorized in December of 2006 (Public Law 109-469).
The coalitions that have been awarded DFC Mentoring grants represent a cross-section of communities from every region in the nation.
In FY 2009, ONDCP awarded 10 new DFC Mentoring Grants and 10 Mentoring Continuation grants.
More information about DFC and DFC Mentoring grants can be found on the DFC Web site (http://www.ondcp.gov/dfc).