Innovative Recruitment and Flexible Screening

Mentoring children of prisoners (MCP) programs consistently report challenges in finding children and volunteers. Carol Dufresne, the former manager for the Amachi program at the New York City Mission Society, shares valuable lessons learned as she departs for a new role as a university chaplain. As many agencies know only too well, Dufresne says that recruiting children was not as easy as she first thought and that she wishes she had known that the screening process for volunteers could take more than a month.

“In a place like New York everyone is really kind of hesitant to sign their kids up into programs because they don’t really know who you are or where you’re coming from,” says Dufresne. To overcome this challenge, she sought out various community social services agencies that already had relationships with families of incarcerated individuals and were willing to provide referrals. “I found that was really helpful,” she says. “The families are much more likely to want to participate in the program, particularly in large urban areas.”

Another unique children’s recruitment strategy that proved extremely effective was for program organizers to visit bus terminals on Friday and Saturday evenings between 8 p.m. and 1 a.m. where families of incarcerated individuals congregate to visit their loved ones in upstate New York prisons. “There you’re meeting with the caregiver, the decision maker in the [recruitment of children] process, and once you’re a regular presence there, people get used to you and people will come to you,” says Dufresne. “It gives you an opportunity to hear firsthand what this is like for the families we are serving.”

Dufrense learned about the bus terminal through diligent reading about families of the incarcerated nationally as well as issues specific to New York City. “I did a lot of reading about how the prison industrial complex and incarceration affects a family, and I made sure my staff did a lot of the reading as well, so that we could really empathize with the situations and the families we were serving.”

Volunteer Screening
What Dufrense’s reading did not prepare her for was the lengthy screening process for volunteers—more than a month in most instances. “You really don’t want to match volunteers with any child,” she says. “If you want to do it right, it can take time. Had I known that going in, as I projected, I would have allowed for that time lag so that my projections would be much more realistic. So what I started doing was beating up on myself and my staff because I didn’t think we were moving fast enough. [It] took a while to realize some stuff there’s no way around.”

For instance, New York requires that volunteer mentors be fingerprinted prior to working with children, a requirement Dufrense soon discovered was a bottleneck in the volunteer screening process. However, she realized that she could minimize this issue by having the Amachi staff trained to do it themselves. “All the mentoring programs citywide were sending their people to be fingerprinted by the same people on the same days that [it was offered],” says Dufrense. This meant that it could take three weeks before the NYC Mission Society received their volunteers’ prints. Now, “when I do a presentation at a church, I come with my staff and we fingerprint people right away and schedule them for their interviews all in one shot.”

Getting the potential volunteers to sign up to be a mentor in the MCP program is just the first hurdle. To ensure that the program is accessible to a large pool of volunteers, the staff must be flexible when scheduling interviews. “Mentors are usually people that work,” says Dufrense. “So if someone gets off of work at 8 p.m., they aren’t going to get to my office before 8:30 and I’m starting the interview at 8:30 or 9:00, and each interview takes about an hour and a half to two hours. But I have to, because if you’re not willing to do that you’ll never get the people.”

Fall 2005