Youth Mentoring as Substance Use Prevention
Expanding a Proven Mentoring Program Instead of Building a New One
Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Texas is using approximately $95,000 in opioid settlement funding to expand its evidence-informed youth mentoring model into the College Station and Brazos area, matching more children who face trauma and family substance use risk with screened, trained adult mentors and built-in prevention supports for both youth and parents.
The Challenge They Were Addressing
Long before any settlement dollars arrived, the staff at Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Texas had a clear view of the gap they wanted to address: too much community investment is going downstream into treatment and the justice system, and too little is going upstream into prevention for the children most at risk. The agency draws roughly 99% of its referred youth from families touched by Adverse Childhood Experiences, with an average of about three ACEs per child. Many also live in households where alcohol, drug, or opioid use is present and under-reported, often surfacing only after a child has been in the program for a while.
In the College Station and Brazos area, the agency saw young people growing up with the same trauma profile and the same family-level substance use risk that the South Texas mentoring model was already designed to address elsewhere. The College Station branch had the program infrastructure to serve more children, but not the dedicated funding to expand recruitment, screening, and match support. New families on the waiting list, including families with siblings of young people involved in the juvenile justice system, were waiting for a mentor that the branch could not yet pay to recruit and train.
When the state opioid settlement RFP appeared, the agency recognized the alignment immediately. It looked very similar to the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention opioid abuse prevention grant the agency already administers through Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, and the body of research on developmental relationships, ACE mitigation, and youth substance use prevention pointed to mentoring as a fit. The College Station settlement expansion, in the agency's framing, is an investment in prevention that does not require building a new program from scratch; it expands an established model into a community that needs it.
What They Built
The College Station expansion takes the long-standing Big Brothers Big Sisters community-based mentoring model. It applies opioid settlement funding to add new one-to-one matches in the Brazos area. Children referred to the program, about 70% of them through their own caregiver, are paired with a screened and trained adult volunteer who commits to spending regular time with the youth in the community. Because the model gives a single adult unsupervised access to a child, the bulk of the work is the screening, training, parent and youth preparation, and ongoing match supervision that surrounds each pairing.
On the volunteer side, the agency uses recruiters and targeted social media and Google ads to find prospective Bigs. Each candidate goes through orientation, layered background checks, three reference calls, an in-person interview, and the first of five required training sessions before being matched. The agency aims to move volunteers from inquiry to their first match within 60 days, though the realistic average is closer to 90 days, as references, scheduling, and match introductions come together. Volunteers complete one training session before meeting their Little, a second within three months, and the remaining three within twelve months. Staff travel to families' homes to interview parents and children when that is necessary to make participation possible.
On the family side, parents and youth come in together for an abuse-prevention training before any match is finalized, with parents and children attending separate sessions. Children learn problem-solving, decision-making, communication skills, what a trusted adult looks like, and how to ask for help. Parents learn how to keep their child safe inside the program and how to partner with agency staff. Parents are also introduced to the 13-week Raising Healthy Kids parenting curriculum and must attend the first session before their child is matched; the agency pays parents $25 per session. Once matched, parents submit a meeting notification form after each outing, describing what their Big and Little did and any concerns. The grant focuses on prevention rather than treatment: parents are invited, not required, to join sessions on the dangers of opioid and other substance use, and the program does not require a child to have direct opioid exposure to participate.
The model rests on the Search Institute's 40 Developmental Assets framework and on developmental relationships research, which the agency's volunteers are explicitly trained to apply. Activities are designed so a Big and Little can attend agency-facilitated outings most weekends, or set their own goal plan and explore the community independently. Typical matches see each other on weekends for two to three hours, at least once a month, and often about twice a month, for as long as the relationship continues. Each match is supported by multiple staff: a volunteer manager who keeps the Big trained and supported, and a parent-youth manager who stays in regular contact with the family.
Key Program Components
Who You Need at the Table
What made a willing partner essential vs. optional?
Each required partner controls something the program cannot operate without. The College Station branch and the South Texas headquarters control the program model, the staff, and the safety system. The national office, through OJJDP, controls the prevention knowledge base and program standards that the agency follows. The settlement funder controls the dollars and the rules attached to them, including the added insurance and family documentation requirements that shaped the start-up timeline. Schools, caregivers, child welfare, law enforcement, and probation control the referrals. Volunteer mentors, the internal training team, and the background-check infrastructure control the day-to-day safety of every match. Without any one of these, a child cannot be referred, matched safely, or supported once matched.
Helpful partners extend the work without sitting at its center. The Search Institute framework is foundational to how the agency approaches its work, but it has chosen to internalize the competencies rather than rely on external delivery. Local training providers, mental health partners, and donors close specific gaps, including family documentation support that lets a child meet program eligibility requirements. However, the program would still operate without any of them. The agency learned, over years of program building, that anything critical to service delivery must be owned in-house so that no child's experience depends on whether the agency can afford a particular outside trainer that month.
Budget Breakdown
What is the minimum viable budget to replicate this?
The replicable unit here is not a brand-new prevention program; it is a defined expansion of an established, evidence-informed mentoring model into a community that needs it. A small county with around $75,000 to $100,000 in settlement funds can use those dollars to add new matches through an existing local mentoring agency by paying for mentor recruitment, screening and background checks, volunteer and family training, and match supervision. The plan should set aside a realistic share of the award for additional insurance or compliance requirements that the funder may impose, and assume a 60 to 90-day window from the volunteer inquiry to the first match. Trying to stand up a new prevention program from scratch with this level of funding is a different and harder undertaking; partnering with an organization that already runs a mentoring model is usually the better path.
What Worked and Why
Specific decisions or design features that drove success
Aligning the settlement application with an existing, evidence-informed model enabled the agency to move quickly when the RFP was released. The College Station expansion is not a new program; it is more of a match in an established model with decades of agency experience behind it. Because the prevention framing already matched the funder's interest in ACEs and trauma mitigation, the application required less invention and more documentation.
Building the program on Search Institute's 40 Developmental Assets and developmental relationships research gives staff and volunteers a shared language for what mentoring is meant to do. Volunteers are trained to understand that the more assets a child accumulates, the less likely that child is to be drawn into substance use as a youth or as an adult. That framing keeps the work focused on prevention rather than on direct response to addiction, which is what the funder is paying for.
Internalizing the competencies that matter most to service delivery has been a long-term design choice that paid off here. Earlier in the agency's history, more of the abuse-prevention and parenting trainings depended on external partners; over time, the agency built its own training department and facilitators so that every match gets the same quality of preparation, regardless of which trainer happens to be available that month or whether grant dollars can cover an outside fee.
Treating compliance as part of the program allowed the agency to absorb start-up requirements without sacrificing safety. When the settlement award required additional excess liability coverage, the board chose to add that coverage agency-wide rather than walk away from the funding, knowing the cost would be allocated across all matches and would only raise per-match costs by a small amount. When local documentation requirements created an access barrier for some families, the agency began planning a donor-funded support track to cover birth certificate and similar fees.
Paying parents $25 per session to attend the Raising Healthy Kids curriculum and requiring them to attend the first session before matching signals from the start that the family is an active participant in the prevention work. When combined with the post-outing meeting notification form, this keeps caregivers in the loop and reinforces the program's safety system for every match.
Early outcomes and data
Approximately $95,000 state opioid settlement award secured for the College Station expansion, separate from the agency's existing federal OJJDP opioid prevention grant.
About 70% of all youth referrals across the agency come through caregivers, indicating strong family-driven uptake when the program is available in a community.
Around 99% of referred youth have at least one ACE; the average is approximately three, with family substance use also present and often under-reported, according to agency leadership.
Across the broader Amachi Texas program for siblings of young people in juvenile facilities, the agency reports that 99.9% (and in some years 100%) of matched siblings do not go on to enter those same facilities, according to agency leadership.
Volunteer onboarding target of 60 days, with a realistic average closer to 90 days as references, scheduling, and match introductions come together.
Across the broader BBBS of South Texas agency, about 50 staff support roughly 1,600 active matches; the College Station expansion adds a defined share of new matches under this infrastructure (specific College Station match counts being compiled as the expansion onboards).
Service-volume and outcome data for the College Station settlement-funded matches: data being compiled, with the first matches expected to begin once added insurance and family documentation supports are in place.
Lessons Learned
Invest upstream. The agency's strongest argument for the College Station expansion is that communities are spending heavily on the response to youth and adult substance use while spending too little on the relationships and supports that prevent it. Settlement dollars used for prevention mentoring buy years of developmental relationship time at a fraction of the downstream cost.
Build on what already works rather than starting from scratch. The College Station expansion succeeded as an application because the model had already been proven elsewhere in the agency, and the funder could see its alignment with existing prevention research. New counties should look first for an established local partner before designing a new program.
Own the competencies that are critical to safety and quality. While the agency once relied more on external trainers, it now runs its own training department for the elements that matter most. Counties replicating this work should build or contract for in-house capacity in screening, training, and match supervision rather than relying on rotating external providers.
Plan for the full cost of compliance from day one. Added insurance coverage, layered background checks, family documentation supports, and reporting infrastructure are not extras; they are part of running a community-based mentoring program safely. Counties should expect compliance costs and decide up front whether the award is large enough to absorb them.
Treat parents and caregivers as full partners. Parents attend training, sign meeting notification forms after each outing, and complete the first session of a 13-week parenting curriculum before matching. Paying parents $25 per session and offering home-based interviews and training reflect the reality of family schedules and signal respect for their time.
Be honest about the timeline. A 60-day target for volunteer onboarding is realistic; a 90-day average is more honest. Counties planning a new mentoring expansion should set expectations with the funder, the board, and referral partners that the first match will likely occur after several months of screening, training, and scheduling.