About the Junior Senior Friends Program

From its origins as a court diversion program in 1975, the Junior Senior Friends Program has expanded over the years to take referrals from schools, community organizations, and parents. Beginning in the early 1980's the program began to offer community-based mentoring services throughout Merrimack County, and into some surrounding towns.

In the late 1990's, Junior Senior Friends began to utilize an explosion of research and interest in youth mentoring. In addition to providing strong scientific evidence of the effectiveness of mentoring, new models of service began to be studied. This led to the development, in 1999, of Junior Senior Friends' first site-based, and first youth-to-youth mentoring model, at St. Paul's School. Rather than the traditional community-based approach, this model matched older students at this college preparatory school with local elementary school students. The match time was spent on the St. Paul's campus with Junior Senior Friends staff providing on-site supervision.

In 2001, Junior Senior Friends began to expand into other models of youth-mentoring, by partnering with School Administrative Unit (SAU) 8 (Concord), and SAU 65 (New London, Bradford, Newbury, Springfield, Sutton, Warner, Wilmont) to connect more of their Students with mentors.

In 2002 the Junior Senior Friends Program continued to partner with local schools by providing support to mentoring efforts at SAU 66 (Hopkinton). The Hopkinton model utilizes older High School students to mentor Middle School students. Junior Senior Friends also partnered with the Concord Boys and Girls Club to provide mentoring at the club during latchkey hours. Other innovative partnerships soon followed including a site-based mentoring program at The Golden Crest assisted living facility, and Friends N' Paws, a mentoring program that matches a Senior Friend who owns a therapeutically trained canine with a Junior Friend who wants to focus on improved reading skills.

In the Year 2003 the Junior Senior Friends Program offers volunteers a variety of ways in which to serve as mentors for school-age children with a record of number of matches of 218. The Junior Senior Friends Program was also awarded a JUMP Grant (Juvenile Mentoring Program) a prestigious federal grant, to focus on expanding and creating new community-based and school-based matches in SAU 18 (Franklin, Hill) and SAU 43 (Newport).