It has been a busy spring at Colorado Youth at Risk with the launch of our sixth program at George Washington High School, our 5^th Annual Toast the Future Silent Auction and cocktail party and exciting news on the grant front.

We are pleased to announce that we received a significant grant from the Statewide Strategic Use Funds (SSUF) of $143,441! This grant money will allow us to expand our services to three new counties. We will be expanding to Logan County, serving the town of Sterling; Elbert County, serving the high school in Elbert; and Arapahoe County where it is undetermined which school will be partnering with us at this time.

In Sterling we are partnering with the Family Resource Center to deliver a Steps Ahead Program to 20 high school students. The end of March John Laney and myself delivered a one-day workshop to 28 community leaders who are working together to make a difference with truancy among high school students. It was a successful workshop and nine people who didn’t intend to become mentors said “yes” by the end of the day. We will be launching a program with the 20 youth in Sterling in the Fall of ‘09.

In Elbert County our long time volunteer and one time staff member John Reardon will be heading up starting a Steps Ahead Program in the Elbert Community. Not only is John well trained on our mentoring model but he is a long time resident of Kiowa, in Elbert County. We will be launching a program in Elbert County with 30 high school students, also in the Fall of ’09.

  We have also hired long time volunteer John Laney as our Program Director to launch the three new programs associated with our expansion. John Laney has been a mentor, has trained 100’s of mentors over the last ten years and has graduated 27 leaders from our adult Leadership Training Program. Because of the success of our Leadership Training Program we are well situated for expanding our services to other communities.  Welcome to both John Laney and John Reardon!

Thank you to all of our funding partners who have so generously contributed to our organization allowing us to grow.  We are excited to become true to our name “Colorado” Youth at Risk and to begin to serve students in other areas of the state.