We select the highest-risk children based on risk factors identified by
research to be most predictive of serious long-term negative outcomes. Each
child is selected based on his or her degree of vulnerability to school failure,
gang and drug involvement, teenage pregnancy, and criminal behavior. Many
of these children have faced poverty, homelessness, neglect, abuse, foster
care, drug and alcohol abuse, parental incarceration, and domestic violence,
and as a result many of them may move and change schools often. Given their
high levels of mobility, these children often fall through the cracks of
most school or community-based mentoring programs. The Friends of the
Children program model is designed to address the specific needs of extremely high-risk
children whose instability renders them outside the bounds of other mentoring
programs.