Our Recommendation
Friends of the Children is a strong organization, particularly for funders who recognize that breaking the cycle of generational poverty requires long-term human relationships rather than short interventions. Its model is explicitly built toward ultimate, whole-life outcomes such as: belonging, self-esteem, emotional health, hope, and agency. It measures both the intermediate milestones (graduation, avoiding the justice system, delaying parenthood) and several ultimate outcomes along the way.
Crucially, it is one of a small number of youth organizations with genuine experimental evidence: an independent Randomized Controlled Trial has already shown significant gains on school behavior, and a larger national RCT tracking ultimate life outcomes into early adulthood is underway.
Friends of the Children's Fierce Certification score is 80/100 points based on our criteria:
✔ Has Ultimate Outcome Goals (20 pts)
✔ Measures Intermediate Outcomes (15 pts)
✔ Measures Ultimate Outcomes (10 pts)
◪ Measures Intermediate and/or Ultimate Counterfactual (10 pts)
✔ Shows Continual Learning & Adaptation (25 pts)
The Social Problem
Children born into deep, generational poverty and adversity face compounding harms from their earliest years. Toxic stress in early childhood can disrupt brain development. Instability at home raises the risk of foster-care placement. Without a stable, caring adult presence, many of these children move toward school failure, juvenile justice involvement, teen parenthood, and a loss of hope, belonging, and belief in their own future. Left unaddressed, these harms tend to repeat across generations, transmitting poverty and trauma from parent to child. Friends of the Children focuses on the children facing the very highest obstacles, identified as early as ages four to six.
The Solution
The intervention is deceptively simple. Friends of the Children pairs each child with a salaried, professional mentor called a "Friend" who stays with that child for 12-plus years, from early childhood through high school graduation, "no matter what." Unlike volunteer mentoring that typically lasts about a year, Friends are full-time employees with small caseloads, professional training, and supervision, so the relationship is consistent and durable.
The network model includes 2Gen and the Roadmap. Individual chapters vary in how fully each is implemented and whether the chapter is inside the measurement sample. Every major activity maps to the same causal bet: a stable, loving, skilled relationship over more than a decade builds the internal assets of self-worth, hope, agency, and connection that let a child rewrite the trajectory adversity would otherwise set.
Key Outputs
Reach and Scale
- Over 20,000 children and caregivers served cumulatively over 30+ years from 48 different US locations
- Under one federal grant cycle: 3,300 matches and youth served, 390 mentors recruited
Service delivery (per child)
- Enrollment age: 4-6, typically identified through schools, child welfare, and community partners
- Commitment length: 12+ years (some materials specify 12.5), pre-kindergarten through high school graduation
- Caseload: 8-10 youth per Friend
- Connections: 3-4 hours per week / 12 hours per month of one-to-one time. The national materials note this is three times the 4-hours-per-month threshold in Elements of Effective Practice in Mentoring. Descriptions of the Two-Generation (2Gen) work put it at 12-16 hours per month covering time with both child and caregivers.
- Settings: school, home, community, plus virtual
Key Intermediate Outcomes
Across the national network's 30+ years, Friends of the Children reports the following:
- 83–90% of youth earn a high school diploma or General Educational Development (GED) credential
- 92% enroll in post-secondary education, the military, or the workforce
- 93–96% stay free of juvenile justice involvement
- 95–98% avoid early parenthood.
The strongest evidence here is counterfactual: the independent 2017 Randomized Controlled Trial (n = 278) found a statistically significant improvement in caregiver-rated positive school behavior and reduced trouble in school for mentored children compared with a control group. The national percentages above, by contrast, are single-group figures without a control comparison, and the graduation/justice/parenthood endpoints are precisely what the ongoing national RCT is now testing counterfactually.
Key Ultimate Outcomes
Friends of the Children reports the following:
- 96% of youth feel a strong sense of belonging to their culture
- 93% of youth remain free from juvenile justice involvement
- 96% of youth were able to accomplish things they are proud of
- 88% of caregivers saw stronger family relationships and 88% saw improved child behavior that made the home a more positive place
Continual Learning & Adaptation
Friends of the Children voluntarily submitted its model to an independent Randomized Controlled Trial and then to a larger, multi-site national RCT run by the University of Washington's Social Development Research Group and funded by the National Institutes of Health (via the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development).
It uses structured Roadmap assessments to track each child's social-emotional and belonging progress. It has also iterated its model over time, adding the Two-Generation (2Gen) caregiver approach and piloting the Strengthening Families Coping Resources curriculum in 2025. The new National Center of Excellence is explicitly framed as a hub for research and innovation.
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