CNE will make a great difference in the lives of these youth as they enter this crucial period of their life. Our seminars and workshops also will teach foster parents how to provide unconditional support and have high expectations of their foster child. Our major goals for this organization is to provide foster youth with the opportunity to graduate from high school, find housing, attend college and acquire the skills necessary to support themselves.Based in Inglewood, CNE would like to employ 10 administrative and programmatic staff members for its first year and 25 more as we continue to build in the future. Our board members recently completed a strategic plan which envisions significant growth in the next five years including the design and implementation of a facility for transitional housing and expansion of its existing mentor and career programs.We will build long-term relationships with these teenagers who already have adults cycling in and out of their lives on a regular basis. Our mentoring programs should screen volunteers thoroughly, both in terms of safety and suitability for mentoring. Our volunteers will complete a written application and in-person interview, and professional references. We will conduct background checks and drug tests. The most qualified mentors will have a goal of supporting foster youth and helping them develop positive relationships in his life, as well as achieving educational, emotional, and social skills. They will meet at least once a week for 6 months with their mentee. Overall, they should see their role as a trusted friend rather than as a teacher or authority figure. Our staff will also assist and train our volunteer mentors on how foster youth will test their patience and limits. Through suggesting activities and writing lessons, our volunteers will learn general information about foster youth development, as well as specific information about teens in foster care.The goal of our positive parenting workshops are to strengthen foster parents' capability to draw upon available resources for their own and their foster children's well-being. Foster Parent education and support programming assumes that foster parents are more likely to provide appropriate nurturance and guidance as they acquire a greater understanding of state custody child development and foster children's needs. Our programs will be designed to improve parenting in general, and focus on specific parenting issues, such as substance-abuse prevention, appropriate discipline, and antisocial behavior. As we expand, we will add programs that will be aimed at specific populations of foster parents, such as parents with foster children at critical periods of development, or single foster parenting. Foster parents can also expect to learn: • Protecting foster children from harm. • Making a difference in a foster child's life. • Helping foster children feel good about themselves. • Learning and using new skills. Our CEO and President will go out to visit group homes and foster homes to administer both a pretest and a posttest to youth participants in order to measure what information is learned by the students during the six-week program. At the conclusion of each session, we also ask participating foster parents to complete a detailed evaluation questionnaire so we can continue to find ways to improve an excellent program. Creating National Empowerment will also be regularly evaluated by an outside panel of professional evaluators. Because it is our goal to teach young people in foster care to become successful in their environment, the CNE program coordinator and others are working to develop a more sophisticated, yet practical, evaluation process in order to measure the long-term impact of the program on youth who participate. The need for Creating National Empowerment is great. Various studies have indicated that young people in foster care tend to have limited education and job skills, and perform extraordinary poorly in school compared to the general population. 80% of prison inmates have been through the foster care systems and are also more likely to be victims of rape, verbal abuse and even death. Teens in foster care are 3 to 6 times more likely than teens not in care to have emotional, behavior and developmental problems, including conduct disordering, depression, difficulties in school and impaired social relationships. Do to the lack of love and feelings of abandonment cause these teens to act out in their adulthood. We must reach them before it’s too late. In the months ahead, CNE will approach several new grant makers for support, for technical assistance and capacity building. With assistance from grantors and donors, CNE will be able to hire a fundraising consultant who will work with our board of directors to develop and implement a strategic fundraising plan that will incorporate and expand annual giving programs. Building a larger individual donor base will complement CNE's successful grant seeking program and help ensure our financial future.