Federal Legislation

Mentoring Legislative Alert: Help Pass the Background Checks Legislation

On July 22, 2010, the House of Representatives passed the Child Protection Improvements Act (HR 1469) by a vote of 413-4. We need your help to get this critical legislation passed in the Senate and signed into law.

The goal of this bipartisan legislation is to allow youth-serving organizations access to FBI background checks on potential volunteers and employees. If passed, the legislation would create a permanent successor to Safety NET-the Child Safety Pilot developed under the PROTECT Act of 2003. Currently, only some states allow access to FBI criminal records and over the past five years, data has proven the critical need for this information in ensuring that the volunteers and employees who would be in direct contact with children are suitable and safe.

As The PROTECT Act Child Safety Pilot, SafetyNET has proven time and again that FBI searches provide information essential for screening youth-serving volunteers and employees. Of the nearly 90,000 volunteers screened during the pilot, more than 6 percent have criminal records of concern, including serious crimes such as murder, rape and child sexual abuse. Furthermore, more than 41 percent of individuals with criminal records of concern had committed crimes in states other than where they were applying to volunteer-meaning only a nationwide check would have caught the criminal records.

We need your help in making SafetyNET permanent. The recently passed House bill (HR 1469) was introduced and championed by Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Mike Rogers (R-MI) and John Conyers (D-MI). The Senate bill was introduced last year by Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA) and is well supported by both sides of the aisle.

Now that this bipartisan legislation has been passed in the House, we need you to contact your Senators and ask for immediate passage of this legislation. Congress has a target adjournment date set for early October, and this legislation cannot wait.

Please click here to contact your Senators to ask for their co-sponsorship of S. 1598.

Members of Congress Support MPM's Appropriation Request!

Above, L-R: Representative Keith Ellison, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Representative Jim Oberstar, Senator Al Franken and Representative Betty McCollum

The Mentoring Partnership of Minnesota (MPM) thanks Minnesota's Congressional leaders for making quality youth mentoring a priority in their 2011 appropriations requests.

In the latest development on July 15, House appropriators, including Congresswoman McCollum (also co-chair of the Congressional Mentoring Caucus), met to report the Labor/HHS/Education Appropriations Bill out of subcommittee. Congressman Ellison and Congressman Oberstar included $200,000 in the bill to support MPM's 2011 earmark request that supports three initiatives:

• Allow MPM to increase staff to support our Quality Mentoring Assessment Path (QMAP) process and provide additional training and technical assistance to programs doing their program self-assessment
• Create a new source of funding designated to mentoring programs who complete their QMAP, develop improvement plans, and work toward quality standards
• Create a 2.0 version of MPM's K-12 Journey Map to include more resources supporting K-12 milestones in preparation for 1-, 2- or 4-year college

"We are proud that our policy leaders in Minnesota understand the importance of measuring the quality of youth mentoring programs and the adoption of best practices as it relates to positive outcomes for youth and their volunteer mentors," says MPM's Executive Director, Joellen Gonder-Spacek. "We want to see a Domino effect: sustainable quality programming and support that leads to stronger matches, stronger matches that lead to long-lasting relationships and guidance that produce better outcomes for youth," says Gonder-Spacek.

In addition to the House members, Senators Franken (D-MN) and Klobuchar (D-MN) also showed their support of MPM's request in the first round of priorities for earmarks in April.

MPM thanks these policy leaders for being true champions of mentoring for youth and mentoring programs in their district.

Which current policies may impact mentoring programs?