The work we do
Case Studies
Client Engagements
"We are fortunate to have partners of your caliber in ACF and know we can count on you to continue to perform your duties and responsibilities in an exemplary manner."
-- Daniel C. Schneider
Acting Assistant Secretary for Children and Families

Examples of how Dare Mighty Things works closely with clients to
achieve specific goals

This page documents many of the ways in which Dare Mighty Things engages with clients, playing a pivotal role in the development and implementation of specific programs and initiatives. Some of the examples described here include links to detailed case studies and client Web sites. Please browse the following descriptions to learn more about how our work impacts the organizations we serve.

Access to Recovery
Strengthening the Services Capacities of Community and Faith-Based Provider Organizations is a program created under the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Working with community and faith-based organizations, many of which are eligible to receive Access to Recovery (ATR) vouchers, the program's mission is to provide support services to recovering substance abusers. SAMHSA elected Dare Mighty Things to help the program's service providers extend their organizational capacities to recovering addicts. Lending its expertise, Dare Mighty Things provided training in infrastructure development, sustainability, entrepreneurship, data reporting, fiscal accounting, marketing, volunteerism, and grantsmanship.

Accountability Based Transition to Employment (ABTE)
The ABTE Project was part of a wide range of comprehensive youth development services provided by the Department of Labor so that all youth, particularly those most disadvantaged, have the academic, technical, and work-readiness skills needed to successfully transition to adulthood, careers and post-secondary education and training. Based on experience gained in a wide variety of mentoring programs, DMT's role was to provide needs assessment, training, and technical assistance to boost performance in the mentoring component of the program at six DOL-selected sites. DMT designed and delivered training at each site, covering a range of topics from recruiting, screening, and training mentors to factors in making successful matches and supporting sustainable relationships, with a specific focus on service-based mentoring activities. During the on-site training, participants quickly embraced the benefits of mentoring, and DMT provided follow-up assistance as each site developed specific action plans to make mentoring a successful program component.

Amachi Mentoring Coalition
In partnership with Public/Private Ventures of Philadelphia, DMT is working with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) to build the capacity of Amachi mentoring programs serving youth impacted by incarceration. The funding for this project, authorized through the Recovery Act, will create approximately 300 jobs, and support over 17,000 mentoring relationships. The P/PV / Dare Mighty Things team aims to build statewide mentoring coalitions to ensure the long-term sustainability of high-quality mentoring services across the country.

Public/Private Ventures (P/PV) is a national nonprofit organization that tackles critical challenges facing low-income communities by seeking out and designing innovative programs, rigorously testing them, and promoting solutions proven to work. Amachi is a unique partnership of secular and faith-based organizations working together to provide mentoring to children of incarcerated parents. Currently there are 250 mentoring children of prisoner programs in 48 states, and the Obama administration has recognized the need for more. P/PV research shows that one-to-one mentoring can improve a child’s academic performance, behavior, family and peer relationships, and self-concept.
http://www.amachimentoring.org/

Angel Tree
Angel Tree, a national ministry program for the children of prisoners, mobilizes more than 15,000 churches to serve nearly 600,000 children each year. Dare Mighty Things worked with Prison Fellowship's Children, Youth & Families Division to redesign and develop an enhanced Angel Tree program with breakaway scale and effectiveness. The redesign and streamlining of this flagship program saw a twenty-two percent growth rate in the first year of reorganization.

Angel Tree's expanding ministry of Family Reconciliation includes year-round features. Angel Tree Camping results in over 7,500 prisoners' children enjoying a week of summer camp and encouragement. Expanding upon that program, more than 2,300 young people, whose parents are incarcerated, are now involved in strong mentoring relationships designed to overcome the odds that indicate that these children may be six times more likely than other youths to end up in prison themselves. The growing reach of Angel Tree is making a difference.
http://www.angeltree.org

APAC
APAC is a highly successful, low cost, faith-based correctional program created in Brazil and replicated in South America, Europe, and Asia. APAC is a Portuguese acronym that stands for the Association for Protection and Assistance of the Condemned. The program has served thousands of prisoners and their families. While recidivism rates among other prisoners are marked at eighty percent, this faith-based alternative has yielded rates as low as four percent. Dare Mighty Things was hired by the Eckerd Foundation to research and document the best practices within APAC that drive its success. This research was published and promoted by Prison Fellowship International, resulting in the expansion of the program in eleven countries.

Caregiver's Choice
Mentoring Children of Prisoners: Caregiver's Choice is a voucher program funded through the Department of Health and Human Services that connects children of incarcerated parents with high-quality mentoring programs. DMT identifies eligible children for the program, helps them enroll, and distributes vouchers worth $1,000 that families can redeem for one year of mentoring services with approved providers. Through this initiative, DMT works closely with MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership to engage key stakeholders, including mentoring programs, state and Federal correctional facilities, faith communities, and nonprofit organizations serving families impacted by incarceration. Between 2007-2010, MENTOR/DMT will distribute 24,000 vouchers to children with incarcerated parents across the country.
http://www.mentoring.org/caregiverschoice

Church-Based Disability Programs
Dare Mighty Things provided research and design for multiple national-scale models that have served as the basis for several church-based disability programs. By the end of 2008, Wheels for the World plans to have cumulatively distributed 52,342 wheelchairs to 102 countries and to have trained hundreds of ministry and community leaders, including people with disabilities. This is one example of the programs available through Joni and Friends.
http://www.joniandfriends.org

Communities Empowering Youth (CEY)
The Communities Empowering Youth Program (CEY), launched under the Compassion Capital Fund (CCF), funds local collaboratives of faith-based and community organizations to address and eliminate gang involvement, youth violence, child abuse, and neglect. CEY confronts this national problem by providing capacity building grants to lead organizations and their partners to strengthen the collaborative and individual partners, align their work, develop effective strategies to reduce youth violence, child abuse, and neglect, and promote positive youth development. Dare Mighty Things (DMT) supports CEY by equipping its grantees with the resources that they need to effectively run and sustain their collaboratives. As part of the CCF array of grant programs, CEY grantees have access to a state-of-the-art virtual community of practice and clearinghouse, training through national conferences and online webinars, and customized one-to-one technical assistance.
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ocs/ccf/existing_grantees/cey.html

Compassion Capital Fund (CCF)
The Compassion Capital Fund (CCF) seeks to increase the scale and effectiveness of faith-based and community organizations, in recognition of their unique strengths and long history of serving communities and people in need. Since 2002, Dare Mighty Things (DMT) has run the CCF National Resource Center (NRC), providing training and technical assistance to CCF grantees and program oversight support to the CCF Program Office. DMT also developed and maintains a comprehensive web-based technical solution with two user interfaces: one for the Federal and NRC staff, and the second for grantees. The first application is a web-based program management system that enables Federal and NRC staff to capture and report individual grantee outcomes and program-wide results. The second application, pulling from the same database, is a state-of-the-art virtual community of practice and clearinghouse that enables grantees to access and share grant management and capacity building resources. DMT won the 2008 Contractor of the Year award from the Administration for Children and Families for developing these innovative systems. DMT has conducted more than 100 site visits, 10,000 remote technical assistance consultations, 13 national training conferences, and 168 webinars. The virtual community of practice includes a clearinghouse that contains more than 500 custom-designed CCF toolkits and guidebooks, grantee samples, resources, articles, and studies relevant to CCF grantees.
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ocs/ccf/

DeVos Urban Leadership Institute
DeVos Urban Leadership Institute, a national leadership-training program, provides intensive breakthrough training for the emerging leaders of urban youth programs in eighteen states nationwide. The DeVos family hired Dare Mighty Things to create a national prototype for a ministry that would reflect the family's core values and interests. After careful evaluation, Dare Mighty Things steered the DeVos family toward the development of a leadership training initiative for urban youth ministry leaders. Building on the organizational values and core competencies of the DeVos family, Dare Mighty Things developed the framework for the DeVos Urban Leadership Foundation, which has equipped over 400 urban youth leaders with the tools to increase the size, scope, and effectiveness of their outreach.
http://www.devosurbanleadership.org/

Employer Support for the Guard and Reserve
Employer Support for the Guard and Reserve (ESGR) is a Department of Defense organization. Established in 1972, ESGR's mission is to coordinate cooperation and understanding between Reserve component members and their civilian employers and to create resolution for conflicts arising between the civilian employers and the Reservists' military commitment. All operations are handled by volunteers throughout the United States, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Europe.

Recently, Reservists have become fundamental in adding manpower to military pursuits abroad. Dare Mighty Things works with ESGR in order to provide training and technical assistance to volunteers in order to gain and maintain active support from all public and private employers for the men and women of the National Guard and Reserve.
http://www.esgr.org

Global Assistance Program
Global Assistance Program (GAP), an initiative of Prison Fellowship International (PFI), mobilizes and sends teams of volunteer professionals to Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America to provide economic aid and medical assistance to prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their families. PFI began the Global Assistance Program in 1994. Dare Mighty Things was tasked with the evaluation and redesign of the GAP program initiatives, the review and research of strategic partnerships, training of regional GAP program directors, and technical assistance for pilot sites. Since 1994, hundreds of volunteer physicians, nurses, optometrists, dentists, and other medical professionals have treated thousands of prisoners in 30 countries, providing donated services and medicines estimated at $10 million. During 2008, medical outreach was conducted in Liberia and Guyana.

GEO Trust
GEO Trust, an international economic development venture, employs thousands of ex-prisoners and their families in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Dare Mighty Things worked with Prison Fellowship to design and develop the Humaita Bread Factory in Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil, the first initiative of the GEO Trust. This initiative, located within the pioneering faith-based Humaita Prison, involved the identification of corporate sponsors, mobilization of volunteers for onsite business planning and building modification, and enterprise start-up and monitoring. The Humaita Prison was cited as having an extremely low recidivism rate among former prisoners in an exploratory study of the impact of religious programs on recidivism.

Heroic Choices
Heroic Choices, a program designed by the Todd M. Beamer Foundation in the wake of September 11th, 2001, helps children experiencing family trauma to overcome their circumstances by making heroic choices every day. Dare Mighty Things provided program research, design, and development expertise to this asset-based program that features long-term mentoring relationships and curriculum-based training. Dare Mighty Things forged strategic partnerships on behalf of the Beamer Foundation and led the development and testing of the initial prototype in the New York City area. Hundreds of traumatized children are engaged in the program.

HopeShare
HopeShare was established by the Salvation Army to break the cycle of despair among high risk children by providing them with a safe place to meet their spiritual and emotional needs. Dare Mighty Things worked with HopeShare to design a program portfolio consistent with existing best practices, market demand, and opportunities for growth. DMT helped create marketing, program development, operations, and financial plans that will ensure successful market entry and national rollout; and will help to build a strong case for financial investment in the HopeShare ministry venture among potential donors.
http://www.hopeshare.org

InnerChange Freedom Initiative
InnerChange, a program of Prison Fellowship Ministries, is a nationally acclaimed, faith-based, volunteer-driven prison model. Based on a restorative prison model established in Brazil in 1973 (see APAC). InnerChange now operates eight pre-release programs in five states - Arkansas, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, and Texas. The first such program for women was established in 2005 in Minnesota, adding to the original five men's programs in operation. IFI also provides a 12 month Reentry Program after release for those that have completed the In-prison Program. This is available in the same five states plus Iowa. Total enrollment is 1,332 individuals; 906 in-prison and 426 re-entry participants.

Dare Mighty Things, Inc. was commissioned to conduct market research and program design by leading a team of correctional, legal and criminal justice experts to Sao Paulo, Brazil to observe APAC, a restorative prison model developed by two local lawyers driven by a desire to see true rehabilitation among the incarcerated population. By assessing this genuinely rehabilitative prison environment, Dare Mighty Things was able to translate APAC's success in Brazil into a program model suitable for replication in the United States. After extensive site visits to several states including North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, California, and Texas, the program model was approved and a Houston-based prison was identified as the prototype site. Dare Mighty Things was then engaged in further proposal development, negotiation and program establishment that has help to launch the InnerChange program and establish the foundation that has allowed for its success to date.
http://www.ifiprison.org

Intermediary Summit
 In 2008, The White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services hired Dare Mighty Things to conduct an Intermediary Summit to identify emerging innovative practices of our nation’s exemplary intermediary organizations. DMT identified the organizations and their practices, planned and facilitated the summit, and drafted the well-received guidebook, Breakthrough Performance: Ten Emerging Practices of Leading Intermediaries, which can be downloaded from our Resource Center.

The purpose of the summit and resulting guidebook was to help established and developing intermediaries to explore and implement practices that are relevant to their mission and community needs, and to help funders enhance existing intermediary partnerships, or create new ones. Eleven leading intermediaries gathered in the nation’s capital for the Intermediary Summit to share practices that have led to breakthroughs in performance.  The guidebook and practices have been promoted at several nonprofit capacity building training events and conferences, and on several related Web sites. Intermediaries exposed to these practices have reported being better equipped to support grassroots faith-based and community organizations that play a vital role in helping our most vulnerable neighbors.

MatchPoint
MatchPoint is based on a national, award-winning program developed in New York by Dave Van Patten and successfully replicated in multiple locations. Dare Mighty Things designed, prototyped, and implemented this faith-based mentoring program for juvenile offenders. Dare Mighty Things researched and designed the national program model, developed all mentoring program collateral including operations and training materials, and provided in-depth national and local training and technical assistance to program leaders.

Mentoring Children of Prisoners
In 2003, the President announced a national initiative to mentor 100,000 children of prisoners by the end of 2008. The Department of Health and Human Services was charged with developing and implementing the Mentoring Children of Prisoners program to achieve this goal. However, during the first 15 months the initiative was falling far short of the goal. Working closely with HHS leaders, DMT implemented an integrated training and technical assistance strategy with intensive onsite technical assistance, regional and national training events, and online learning opportunities. Within months, the trajectory of the initiative had changed. By September of 2008, the program had achieved its goal and over 100,000 children of prisoners had been mentored.

National Guard Family Program Training
In partnership with Goldbelt Wolf of Alexandria, VA, DMT is developing a systems approach in the training program of the National Guard Family Program Division to obtain an overall view of training processes. Analysts and program designers are developing an approach that will ensure training programs and the required support materials are continually developed in an effective and efficient manner to match the variety of needs of the Family Program and National Guard families.
National Guard Family Program

National Guard Yellow Ribbon Benchmarking
The goal of the Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program (YRRP) is to prepare service members and families for mobilization, sustain families during mobilization, and reintegrate service members with their families, communities, and employers upon redeployment or release from active duty. The evolution of YRRP at national, state, and local levels across all reserve components has underscored the need for a consolidation and promulgation of best practices to increase consistency in performance and expand services in both scale and effectiveness. Dare Mighty Things is supporting the National Guard Yellow Ribbon Program with the development of a standardized “toolkit” built from field-tested best practices that have proven successful throughout the nation. This benchmarking effort and associated toolkit is a foundational step in developing the a Center of Excellence for the YRRP. It provides an opportunity to identify the best and most promising displays of support, distill that information for broader applications, and distribute successful solutions to ensure even greater consistency and effectiveness in the future.

National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program
The National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program is a national initiative designed to reclaim the lives of America's at risk-youth through the instilling of values, skills training, education, and self-discipline. DMT was initially engaged to design the program's mentoring model and mentor/mentee training. The relationship has grown, with DMT now providing national level training and technical assistance to the program. The relationship between ChalleNGe and DMT has resulted in the training of more than 7,000 employees and has helped contribute to over 90,000 successful ChalleNGe graduates.
www.ngycp.org

National Mentor Training Research
National Mentor Training research, conducted on behalf on MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership, has resulted in the development of nationally utilized mentor/mentee training curriculum. Dare Mighty Things conducted extensive research into this field to develop a widely-used standard for deploying various mentor/mentee training elements.
http://www.mentoring.org

OJJDP Training and Technical Assistance
In partnership with Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) of Newton, MA, Dare Mighty Things has been awarded a grant to provide training and technical assistance to mentoring programs supported by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), U.S. Department of Justice. EDC and DMT are helping OJJDP expand its national leadership role in the youth mentoring arena by advancing the capacity of state and local jurisdictions and Indian tribal governments to develop, implement, expand, evaluate, and sustain youth mentoring efforts that incorporate research-based findings of best practices and principles. In addition, the training and technical assistance under this initiative will provide support to mentoring programs and initiatives funded by OJJDP, including the Recovery Act National Mentoring Program and the Recovery Act Local Youth Mentoring Initiative.

Passage
Passage, an initiative of Promise Keepers, is a national movement of young men who complete a rites-of-passage, mentor-assisted curriculum designed to cast vision, ignite passion, and build capacity to become godly men. Dare Mighty Things designed, developed, and launched this nationally recognized program. In 2002 and 2003, Passage events held in Ohio and California reached a combined 24,000 young men, fathers, mentors, and leaders.
http://www.promisekeepers.org

Prime Time
Prime Time is a national faith-based, after-school program designed to provide children a safe place during the critical after school hours from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., where they are engaged in a group mentoring curriculum delivered by caring adult volunteers. Dare Mighty Things assisted Scripture Union in the research and design of this initiative. There are now eighty-nine active Prime Time programs reaching 1,732 children on a regular basis. Scripture Union has partnered with The Salvation Army and World Vision in order to implement Prime Time on an even greater scale.

STARBASE
DoD STARBASE is a premier educational program designed to encourage elementary students to pursue careers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Targeting fifth graders from populations that are socio-economically disadvantaged and traditionally underrepresented in the technology fields, STARBASE offers stimulating "hands-on, minds-on" STEM opportunities to students with little prior exposure. DMT has been engaged to design, develop, and launch a pilot mentoring component for STARBASE Academies located across the country. Hundreds of middle school students are expected to be engaged in mentoring relationships by the end of the pilot roll-out in the summer of 2010.
http://www.starbasedod.com/

Strengthening Communities Fund
The Strengthening Communities Fund is a Recovery Act-funded initiative set forth by President Obama in 2009. It has two programs -- the State, Local, and Tribal Government Capacity Building Program and the Nonprofit Capacity Building Program. The purpose of the State, Local, and Tribal Government Capacity Building Program is to build the capacity of government offices that provide outreach to faith- and community-based organizations, and to assist nonprofit organizations in addressing the broad economic recovery issues present in their communities. The focus of the Nonprofit Capacity Building Program is to build the capacity of funded projects' nonprofit partners in order to address the broad economic recovery issues present in their communities. Both programs involve helping low-income individuals secure and retain employment, earn higher wages, obtain better-quality jobs, and gain greater access to state and Federal benefits and tax credits.

Dare Mighty Things serves as the National Resource Center (NRC) for both programs by providing in-person and web-based training and technical assistance services and products to grantees funded under the both SCF programs. DMT also provides consulting and technical services to Administration for Children and Families Office of Community Services as they implement the program.
Strengthening Communities Fund

Sycamore Tree Project
Sycamore Tree Project is an eight to twelve week program that connects offenders with crime victims (unrelated to the offenders' crimes) to talk about the harm and impact of criminal offenses. In 2003, STP held operations in six countries across the globe. Dare Mighty Things researched and designed the Sycamore Tree Project and wrote the prototype curriculum.

Teamworks
Los Angeles Team Mentoring, (LATM), a group mentoring program for middle-school students was initially designed by DMT in the aftermath of the civil unrest after the Rodney King verdict to provide positive alternatives for youth to gang violence, drug abuse and negative role models. Dare Mighty Things' pioneering design of the LATM model features two integral components: an activity-based curriculum and a team of mentors that use this curriculum to develop leadership, teambuilding and conflict resolution skills which produce powerful youth outcomes. Since 1992, LATM has served over 13,000 students in twelve Los Angeles middle schools.
http://www.latm.org/

Victory Generation
Victory Generation, a program of the Black Ministerial Alliance of Greater Boston, provides grant funding, technical assistance and support to ten after-school programs serving 450 youth, ninety percent of whom come from low or very low income families in Boston's communities of color. Dare Mighty Things developed the program model for Victory Generation, which provides a nurturing, culturally enriching learning environment for children grades K - 8 primarily from the communities of Dorchester, Roxbury, Chinatown, and Mattapan in Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to homework assistance, participants receive instruction in literacy and mathematics skills based on the standard guidelines set by the state of Massachusetts. Evaluation results show that 100% of program participants were promoted to the next grade level in 2007 with 75% of participants showing measurable grade improvement in mathematics and English.
http://www.bmaboston.org

WorldChair Limited
WorldChair Limited, an international manufacturing company in Kenya, Africa, produces affordable wheelchairs for disabled children worldwide. DMT researched and developed the WorldChair prototype, researched and wrote the business plan, secured international NGOs as customers, and helped our client secure first round funding to launch the venture.

YouthBuild
YouthBuild USA is a program designed to reclaim the lives of at-risk youth and rebuild their communities. DMT conducted program analysis, designed a mentoring component for their program and conducted training and technical assistance for the 16 pilot programs. The mentoring model was an innovation in youth-initiated mentoring. The pilot sites are currently engaged in their first iteration of the mentoring model and are looking forward to great success.
www.youthbuild.org